Program Length: 41 Reading Selections
Age Group: 13-18
Author: Nancy McLaren, M.Ed.
A Character Education Curriculum for Today’s Teenagers
The Art of Loving Well: A Character Education Curriculum for Today’s Teenagers is a nationally acclaimed, literature based relationship skills curriculum from Boston University that teaches healthy relationship skills to youth. This program teaches students about the complexities and joys of a wide variety of relationships, including friendships and family, infatuations and first romances, enduring commitments and marriage. Studying short stories, poems, essays, folk tales, and myths empowers teachers to help students connect ideas in literature to choices in real life and the skills necessary to achieve healthy relationships.
Overview
The Art of Loving Well anthology includes 41 selections divided into three sections: Early Loves and Losses, Romance, and Commitment and Marriage, which provide both lessons and practice. This curriculum empowers teens by honing the full range of communication and critical thinking skills, but it is also skill-based in a much broader sense. The text includes such concrete activities as rewriting a discussion to defuse anger, providing sound advice to a friend in trouble, and tending a colicky “egg baby” for four days.
Loving Well stories and poems explore universal human emotions and challenges. Experience shows that students, even students who struggle to read, are so intrigued by the stories that they read more than are assigned because the topics are so relevant to their lives. These stories teach constructive ways to resolve conflict; they teach about self-knowledge, feelings, and character; and they give language to key concepts. They also cultivate an appreciation for important communication skills like reflecting before acting and agreeing to communicate precisely, fearlessly and kindly.
Teens will learn:
- Key concepts in relationships.
- A vocabulary of self-knowledge, feelings, and character.
- Basic and subtle communication skills.
- Constructive ways to resolve conflict.
- Awareness of body language and intonations as well as word choice.
- A sense of ease with the most daunting of four letter words, L-O-V-E.
Literature-Based Character Education
By Stephan Ellenwood and Nancy McLaren
“Relationships are the most complex things ever thought up besides computers!” Though embedded with considerable exasperation as well as awe, this insight reflects significant progress for one eighth grader in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Just six weeks earlier, before he and his classmates embarked upon an innovative educational experiment, he admittedly saw “chicks” as little more than fair targets for his unruly adolescent hormones, and the word “relationship” was not in his lexicon. At the same time in Roxbury, one of Boston’s inner city neighborhoods, chronic low achievers in another middle school classroom boasted of reading an entire book for the first time ever. Their teacher complained, with mixed emotions, of problems keeping his stock of books from disappearing. He marveled that parents, too, were often reading the homework assignments and talking to their teenagers about them. And in rural Dudley near the Connecticut border, a thirteen-year-old girl labeled “at risk” was lamenting, “I learned practically nothing from this book. I have already learned this stuff by living my life and making mistakes… I guess I wish this book would have come out a lot earlier so I wouldn’t have had to go through the things I did to learn about it.”
Roots in character education
Getting the green light
Literature-based education addresses life’s complexities
Rich literature is an effective antidote to the intrinsic impulsiveness of adolescents, especially in an electronic era. If it is true that the medium is often the message, curricula that depend on careful reading and thoughtful conversation are powerful models for the responsible, informed, respectful communication essential to all healthy human relationships. In addition, literature-based education shows students that art is not an irrelevant pastime typically reserved for Sunday afternoons. On the contrary, fine literature etches life’s complexities clearly and when well taught inspires us to discover wisdom for our own lives.Too often literature has been taught as autopsy. The corpus put on the table, bright lights turned on, the blood drained, and the cold dissection continued until the remains are buried. We advocate teaching literature in ways that are not so clinical and bloodless but that are enlivening and vital. Good teachers first urge students to react to the selections intuitively, emotionally, vigorously, to note the appealing and appalling traits of the characters, the nuances of conflicts, and the consequences of decisions and actions. They then encourage students to go beyond their initial impressions, to revisit and refine their insights, to respect differing opinions, and to appreciate life’s ambiguities. An important axiom of The Loving Well Project is that haste is an archenemy of wisdom.Finally and most importantly, good teachers connect ideas in literature to choices in real life. Conversations begun in the classroom but expanded to include parents, other adults, and friends who are not classmates help teenagers come to appreciate the value of collective wisdom. It also helps them realize that we continue to grapple with the intricacies of relationships throughout adulthood and that the potential rewards are worth the effort. As students consider the connections to their own lives, the story can remain a sanctuary. Talking about fictional characters and events affords a measure of safety but can address very personal issues.Although not every discussion will have immediate connections to every student’s life, we believe in the squirrel theory of knowledge. Students will accumulate literary referents or nuggets of wisdom to store away until they need them sometime in the future. In any event, the school will have promoted the principle that slowing down, observing carefully, reflecting and deliberating are sound habits for making important decisions and building healthy relationships.
The three Vs: Vexing, vivid, and vicarious
The first, and perhaps most consequential, step in developing the Loving Well program required the selection of engaging stories, poems, essays, folk tales, and myths. Each literary selection needed to vex the students a bit, to be vivid enough to engage the students, and to provide a vicarious experience that would encourage students’ thinking about relationships. An author’s artful use of language shapes the reader’s imagination and understanding often by the choice of a single word or phrase. Therefore, in order to understand a story fully, readers must slow down, or “text crawl.” No more needs to be said about the divergent backgrounds of two classmates in Robert Cormier’s “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” than that Jerry lives in a tenement while Rollie Tremaine lives in “a big white birthday cake of a house.” The images and implications merit a thoughtful lingering and contribute importantly to character development.In the same story, eleven-year-old Jerry is completely vexed by his fifteen-year-old brother who has become so Romantically bewitched that he loses interest in baseball and writes letters he never intends to send. Jerry’s sense of family loyalty is strong enough that he eventually sacrifices a coveted “Official Imitation Major League Baseball Glove” in the interest of the romance, but his ambivalence is captured in three simple words, “Love, I muttered.” Another virtue of good literature is that it allows students to identify with characters most like themselves. The range of developmental differences is so broad in a typical eighth grade classroom that both Jerry’s and his brother’s feelings are likely to resonate. When our eighth grader in Williamstown spoke of relationships as rivaling computers in complexity, he was beginning to understand how quality relationships demand more than merely impulsive exchanges. In a most basic sense, Loving Well is an anti-impulse curriculum. The characters, their problems, their feelings, and their relationships, are interesting enough that the reader wants to slow down and revisit various moments of the story for a more complete understanding. Skilled teachers reinforce this habit of reflection and sense of detail as essential to resolving each story’s problems. Vivid literature entices readers to become involved vicariously, to care about the characters and their fate. The situations are believable and relevant. It has been remarked that if we see a movie one night and involuntarily think about it the next day, then it is a film. These involuntary reflections suggest that it was a form of art, its impact beyond simple entertainment. The 40 selections in the hardcover Art of Loving Well anthology were selected to have a similar impact. The collection evolved over three editions and now reflects quite inclusively the cultural and ethnic diversity of our student audience. Highly animated classroom discussions attest to the intensity with which students take the characters, the stories, and the issues to heart and allow their fictional experiences to inform their daily lives. As one student put it, “My favorite stories were ‘Appointment with Love’ and beauty and the Beast’ because one of my weakest points is judging people by the way they look. Or that was my weakest point anyway.” Clearly, this young woman has developed some meaningful literary referents to guide her future thinking and behavior.Not only the 13-year-old in Dudley but older brothers and sisters of many Loving Well students comment poignantly that they wish they’d been better prepared in order to avoid the pain and sometimes tragic mistakes of early romantic encounters. Vicarious literary experiences, well taught, enable a student to enter subsequent real-life situations as an experienced person. Awash in the insecurities typical of their age, adolescents entering their teenage years tend to think confusion and uncertainty uniquely theirs. In the words of Parr (1992), an authority in the field of character education,”…literature has the ability to break into the sense of individual isolation that so often induces moral apathy and me-ism. By giving students an awareness that they are part of a larger community, it reassures them that they alone do not carry the burden of certain thoughts, ideas and feelings” (p. 19). The varied literary settings, the times and places near and far, underscore the universality of the literary themes and underscore the value of collective wisdom. From time to time teachers have expressed concern that the reading level of some selections might be too difficult especially for some of the chronic low achievers who most need the curriculum. Throughout the field testing it became evident that the inherent interest level motivated students to rise to the challenge. In short, they understand far more about the stories and the issues than we would have expected. In those few cases where actual learning disabilities present obstacles to independent reading, we still contend that students should not be denied access to first rate literature. We urge teachers to read some selections aloud if need be. Perhaps some of the better readers could read the selection in a “readers’ theatre” format to the class.It is a pleasure to remind students after a vigorous, productive class discussion that all the heat and light was generated by a few printed pages not by a high-action, color enhanced, stereophonic video.
Good literature is interdisciplinary
Good literature, like life, is not only complex, it is thoroughly interdisciplinary. Its richness enables much flexibility in the classroom. Even a minor point in a story can become a major point of classroom discussion. For example, in Elizabeth Enright’s “A Distant Bell,” 11-year-old Susie notes a change in her father. “He looked greatly refreshed, and there was a whiff of something about him: a whiff of something to drink, I thought. I was glad. If he felt better, then I felt better, too.” This observation is only one of many indications of an uneasy father-daughter relationship. Though his drinking is never mentioned again, Susie’s statement can serve as a point of departure for an important discussion about uses and abuses of alcohol and its impact on relationships. Though field tested primarily in language arts classes, the Loving Well program has been adopted by many health teachers who see one of their primary goals as empowering students to build happy, productive, responsible relationships. And schools that have instituted regular advisory or guidance periods find many of these short literary selections suitable for single session discussions. It is ideal when one good story becomes the topic of the day in lunchrooms, hallways, locker rooms, and in regular classes; then the school has gone a long way toward developing the school’s sense of community and commitment to character education. In describing the impact of the Loving Well curriculum on his teachers and students, John D’Auria, principal of Wellesley Middle School in suburban Boston, attests to the potential interdisciplinary impact of literature-based programs:It grounds the quest for intimacy in thoughtful reflection; it stretches students to look beyond themselves and find what is important in friendship, family, and love. This is learning which enriches the individual and strengthens the bonds we have with each other.
References
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1989). Turning points: Preparing American youth for the 21st century. New York: The Carnegie Corporation.Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. New York: Harper &Row.Jackson, P. R. Boostrom, & D. Hansen (1993). The moral life of the schools. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco. Leming, J. S. (1993). In search of effective character education. Educational Leadership 51X3), 63-71. Lickona, T. (1991). Educating for character: Now our schools can teach respect and responsibility. New York: Bantam Books. Pan; S. R. (1982). The moral of the Story, literature, values, and American education. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Stephan Ellenwood teaches at Boston University, Massachusetts.Nancy McLaren is the Loving Well Project coordinator.
Section One: Early Loves and Losses
- “A Little Briar Rose” by the Brothers Grimm
- “A&P” by John Updike
- “President Cleveland, Where are You?” by Rovert Cormier
- “If Only” by anonymous author
- “Ancestor” by Jimmy Santiago Baca
- “The Old Grandfather and His Little Grandson” by Leo Tolstoy
- “A Distant Bell” by Elizabeth Enright
- “Welcome” by Ouida Sebestyen
- “Fifteen” by Bob Greene
- “Boy Meets Girl” by Peter Stone and Carl Reiner
- Student Poetry
- “Being Male”
- “Do You Think”
- “Uncertainty”
Section Two: Romance
- “Cinderella” by Charles Perrault
- “Cinderella” by the Brothers Grimm
- “The City of Trembling Leaves” by Walter van Tilburn Clark
- “Sixteen” by Maureen Daly
- “What Means Switch” by Gish Gen
- “The Makeover of Meredith Kaplan” by Barbara Girion
- “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare
- “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims
- “Too Early Spring” by Stephen Vincent Benet
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (excerpt) by Carson McCullers
- “Up on Fong Mountain” by Norma Fox Mazer
- “Houseparty” by Walter Bernstein
- “The Elephant is Slow to Mate” by D.H. Lawrence
- “Ben’s Story” by anonymous author
- “Judy’s Story” by anonymous author
Section Three: Commitment and Marriage
- “Beauty and the Beast” by Madame Leprince de Beaumont
- “Appointment with Love” by anonymous author
- “Ozzie and Harriet” by Irene Wanner
- “Beyond What” by Alice Walker
- “The Birthday Party” by Katherine Brush
- “Funeral Plans” by J. California Cooper
- “Alone” by Maya Angelou
- “Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds” by William Shakespeare
- “Experiences in a Concentration Camp” by Victor Frankl
- “Cupid and Psyche” by Apuleius
- Order for the Marriage Service
- Ceremony of Marriage
- “I Love You” by Elmo Robinson
Nancy McLaren, M.Ed.
Nancy McLaren, M.Ed., who earned her degrees at Smith College and Harvard University, began her career in education at Newton South High School in Newton, MA, where she taught English to students who ranged from at-risk to advanced placement. She also served as a master teacher for Middlebury College’s Breadloaf School of English.Since 1985, McLaren has been at Boston University’s School of Education where her primary interest is literature-based curriculum. Supported by grants from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, she has been the principal developer and coordinator of both The Character Project and The Art of Loving Well curriculum for secondary school students. She is an eight-time presenter at Smart Marriages conferences and has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States and in Europe.The Report Card
No part of The Loving Well Project was more daunting than the evaluation required under our federal grant. Admittedly more inclined to the poetic and narrative than to the statistical, those of us in the Loving Well office were both grateful for and apprehensive about the grant stipulation that the formal, quantitative evaluation come from a source external to Boston University. The research evaluator hailed from Boston College. Finding test sites was initially difficult because the questionnaire designed to evaluate changes in eighth graders’ attitudes and behavior was intrusive and sexually explicit. Schools and parents who protested had a legitimate complaint. It was also unfortunate that this questionnaire administered at the outset and conclusion of the Loving Well unit set an inappropriate tone for the program, which is far more than a sex education program and does not contain sexually explicit language. However, as the Loving Well Project became known in the field test states of Massachusetts, Maine, and eventually South Carolina, schools were willing to overcome their objections in order to be included.
Another problem, albeit a gratifying one, had to do with control groups. In an attempt to establish a more rigorous evaluation standard than most other research based pregnancy prevention programs, we required teachers who taught Loving Well to use one of their classes as a control group (a group that did not study the curriculum). By giving pretests and post tests to both experimental and control groups and comparing the differences, we could more reliably determine any changes in attitudes or behavior that resulted from the curriculum. Once familiar with Loving Well, however, schools were reluctant to deny the curriculum to any eighth grade class and some only complied with our control group requirement under protest. Furthermore, the literature and discussions were so engaging that teenagers naturally wanted to talk about them with all their friends. It required significant commitment on the part of both faculty and students to minimize casual conversations about the substance of the curriculum outside the classroom in order to avoid inadvertently contaminating the control group.
Throughout the field testing, the anecdotal, or qualitative, evaluation was uniformly enthusiastic. Project staff who observed classes regularly and held periodic teacher workshops heard uniformly glowing reports from students, teachers, and those parents who could be enticed to participate. Among the most memorable was the comment from one teacher who reported that her experiences teaching The Art of Loving Well had reminded her why she had gone into education in the first place. Another claimed that “Loving Well is one of the most exciting places of discovery that I have experienced in sixteen years of teaching.” And many in lauding the teacher training sessions expressed gratitude for the opportunity to contemplate good literature and discuss life and love with colleagues. Teachers were energized in ways that were evident to their students, and closer, more trusting relationships were forged in Loving Well classrooms. The enthusiasm of parents was very much a relief. Boston University attorneys had been alerted to expect some of the controversy usually associated with sexuality education programs, but there was virtually none. Initial apprehensions were almost always allayed by close scrutiny of the book and Teacher Guide.
When it came to a statistical evaluation of the project, however, developers remained skeptical. And if the truth be known, some still wonder about the reliability of eighth graders’ self-reports on sexual attitudes and behavior. However, the project evaluator found significant statistical corroboration of the positive impact of The Loving Well Project. When control group attitudes toward issues of sexuality were compared to attitudes of the experimental group, students involved in Loving Well developed a clearer understanding of both the short term and long term consequences of premature sexual activity. In higher proportions they also felt that people should not be pressured into having sex, and they did not intend to have sex while young teenagers. This result was confirmed by another dramatic finding that focused on students who had never had sexual relations when they entered eighth grade. Those who participated in the Loving Well program were three times more likely to continue to abstain throughout the course of the eighth grade than were their control group peers. A disturbing 28% of the control group became sexually active during that year; in the experimental group that number was only 8%.
A more detailed summary of the evaluation report can be obtained by writing The Loving Well Project, School of Education, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, or call 617-353-4088. However, nothing in the 34 pages of formal evaluation says it as well as one 15-year-old young man in Lynn, Massachusetts: “It sounds like a stupid title, but it teaches you a lot of things about life.”
What Others Have to Say
“I have personally observed Loving Well being taught in a number of classrooms across the socio-economic spectrum, and have had the chance to interview the teachers. Moreover, I have piloted Loving Well myself with mainstream high schoolers at my church, alternative high school, with adolescents in juvenile correction programs, and high risk African American and Asian middle school girls. What I and other teachers have found is that literature is, in fact, an incredible tool. Great stories and their lessons are remembered because they move us and draw us in emotionally – they touch us in a way that straight information can never achieve.”
Marline Pearson, M.A., Social Science Instructor and author of Love U2 ® healthy relationship curriculum for youth, Madison Area Technical College
“Loving Well takes the normal English curriculum and blows it out into the real world.”
Paul Patinaude, Teacher, Dudley, MA
“Loving Well is one of the most exciting places of discovery that I have experienced in sixteen years of teaching. To me, it’s been fascinating, an adventure that I could not have predicted before I started teaching this curriculum.”
Phyllis Kutt, Teacher, Brookline, MA
“It sounds like a stupid title, but it teaches you a lot of things about life.”
15-year-old boy, Lynn, MA
“I have learned a lot from the Loving Well program. I can now get along better with people and I can do more things on my own. My Mom and Dad can see the changes in me and are proud of me for making good changes in my life.”
High school junior, Yarmouth, ME
“I learned practically nothing from this Loving Well book. I have already learned this stuff…by living my life and making mistakes…I guess I wish this book would have come out a lot earlier so I wouldn’t have to go through the things I did to learn about it.”
8th grade girl, Dudley, MA
“I know I don’t have real love now. Loving Well made me realize that. I just now realize how young I am and how I’m not physically or mentally ready for anything that demanding. Before reading Loving Well I didn’t care and thought ‘Why not?’ But now I’m glad I never gave in and now I know I don’t want to. I want to wait.”“This book did make me think “What am I doing with my life, it’s just going down the drain.”
8th grader, Bath, ME