This paper examines ways in which educators can productively help K-!2 students learn how to
evaluate and adapt moral exemplars. The optimal model for helping students on these
important matters focuses on narrative – stories, fictive and real, that come to students
regularly through careful K-12 curriculum planning. Stories provide students with
opportunities to see the world through the eyes of others. Stories also help students develop two
important qualities – first, enriched understanding of how broad, abstract principles and virtues
work out in the complex lives of specific individuals; second, the ability and inclination to slow
the pace of contemporary life that allows careful, collaborative reflections. Vital to the success
of this reform is teachers steadily gaining command of the four categories in Zagzebski’s
“emotion of admiration.” Additionally, Brooks highlights the powerful influences of
community ethos in its “distinct moral ecology.” As teachers steadily share their growing
insights of these nuanced exemplars they quickly become emboldened to enrich their
classrooms by including stories, video, film, biographies and real-life characters at all grade
levels and across all subject areas.
