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Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, who died in 2013, wrote stories that offer students from all disciplines valuable insights about the world they want to fix one day. EPA/Frank May

The real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives.

How can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a dictator? Perhaps by reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, a magnificent historical novel about the tyrannical Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Students who read it are unlikely to forget the dizzying Cold War political intrigues that led the US to first support Trujillo and then implement sanctions against him.

In area studies, students must learn about the politics of postcolonial government. Chinua Achebe's 1966 novel, A Man of the People, explores how rapidly post-independence revolutionary zeal can turn venal as the corrupt, greedy postcolonial elite seizes the reins of power from the coloniser only to further strangle the majority.

I would suggest that teaching these and other subjects - history, economics, sociology, geography and many others - can only be enhanced by including novels, short stories and artistic feature films. Students will also benefit from learning the methods of critical reading that are inherent to literary study. In this article I will explore why this is the case, focusing largely on the important but contested field of international development studies.

Why development is about more than economics

International development studies cries out for a literary component precisely because it is such an ideological and normative subject. "Development" is itself a term that should demand ideological evaluation. It is more than economics. This is made clear by the UN's Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals. These reiterate that "development" also focuses on cultural change, such as gender equity through empowering women and girls.

But the syllabus of almost any international development studies course contains a heavy dose of development economists: Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs. Or, if the professor is slightly more left-leaning, there will be works by anthropologists like James Ferguson and Arturo Escobar or brilliant political science professor Timothy Mitchell. Why only these? This is an area in which books in the humanities and arts are pertinent, yet one never sees a postcolonial novel on these syllabi.

It is frankly criminal. Development was constituted as a field of study and area of practice during the years of decolonisation after World War II. This was the very same time period which spawned the birth of what is today called postcolonial literature. But international development studies courses seldom broach the fundamental question of what is truly meant by development. Developing to what? For whose benefit? Under whose aegis? This question, however, is interrogated in a vast body of excellent fiction.

I have prescribed Nuruddin Farah's 1993 novel, Gifts - inspired by Marcel Mauss' classic ethnography The Gift - to my students. When development aid from powerful countries is donated to impoverished 1980s Somalia, a fine line is walked by both the West which "gives" and the Somalis who "receive." The book is a long meditation on the tightrope act that teeters between donation and domination. Certainly my students learned more about how it really feels to be the recipient of donor aid from this novel than any of our social science readings, which were mostly written from the donors' point of view.

Exploring different points of view

This isn't to suggest that such novels are stand-ins for "native informants", who are perceived to be experts about a culture, race or place simply because they belong to it. Quite the contrary. They should be read as literature, which literary critics like Mikhail Bakhtin describe as a jumble of competing viewpoints depending on language that always struggles to convey actual truth.

Point of view might be an easier concept for students to grasp at first than Bakhtin's theory. It is a basic narrative technique that is explored in Literary Criticism 101 because it can change the way a story is told or perceived. In the rich 2006 film Bamako the people of Mali put the World Bank on trial to determine why their poisoned "gift" of development aid has left the country with such a debilitating debt burden.

From the World Bank's perspective, development might mean one thing but for those "beneficiaries," it means something quite different. Art has the power to convey that point of view with visceral impact. Isn't this essential for international development students who aim to help the "other" to "develop"?

Room for myriad insights

The end state of "development," which is implied but hardly ever explicitly theorised in international development studies, is "modernity" and becoming "modern". This is a subject on which literature and literary theory can offer myriad insights.

Zakes Mda's wonderful 2005 novel Heart of Redness depicts the tale of a contemporary village in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, two groups of villagers hold radically different positions on what development means to them. Does it mean street lamps and a casino resort that will bring tourists? Or maintaining a more "traditional," environmentally-sustainable lifestyle albeit with some "modern" amenities? The villagers' differing positions are also informed by their different views on their history of colonisation.

History is, of course, essential for understanding any subject. For this reason I've not restricted myself to postcolonial literature only in teaching my classes. Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, is an excellent novel for introducing the study of British imperialism which is a prerequisite for understanding our contemporary global cultural economy.

Pushing for positive change

In our globalising world, the stakes could not be higher. Many of our students will end up making policy, allocating aid, driving the global economy. They will change the world. Literature and humanistic thinking enable them to change it for the better.

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How reading fiction can help students understand the real world

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The real world is often overwhelmingly complicated. Literature can help. This is true at universities too: courses in comparative literature offer students new insights into their chosen disciplines by unlocking new, varied perspectives. How can those studying political science truly grasp the terror of living under a dictator?

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In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups - scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.

Those divisions within the university seem now more deeply entrenched than ever before. And those working within the arts and the sciences face a third antagonist in society: Populism, with its attendant and increasing distrust of intellectuals.

This powder keg occurs in a context of growing economic disparity and, incongruously, the increasing role of technological innovations in our daily life.

I'm a computer scientist who studies digital culture. I try my best to bridge the divides, but constantly ask the question: How can universities train our scientists, technologists and engineers to engage with society, as Snow suggested, rather than perform as cogs in the engine of economic development?

I believe we need our educational system to engage students with issues of ethics and responsibility in science and technology. We should treat required arts and humanities courses not as some vague attempt to "broaden minds" but rather as a necessary discussion of morals, values, ethics and responsibility.

Identifying society's grand challenges

I was recently part of a conversation at the Fields Institute at the University of Toronto which asked another question: " What does the A stand for in STEAM? "

STEAM inserts arts into the acronym for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). I chose to frame the arts more widely to include the humanities, and asked the attendees: How do we identify the challenges we wish to work on?

In the 1960s, Alan Ginsberg bemoaned what he saw as the dominant culture oppressing artistic creativity. Written today, his poem Howl might cry something like this:

"I saw the best minds of my generation spend their lives optimizing microseconds out of their high-frequency trading algorithms, or devising routing-algorithms for drone-delivered burritos."

Are these the biggest problems for our society?

Graduates of science and engineering programs understandably chase positions in start-ups or high-salaried finance jobs. Their knowledge of algorithmic development, data analysis or simply structured scientific thinking may net them fantastic jobs at a variety of private-sector employers.

But the problems they engage with, while impacting a large number of citizens, may not improve the lot of those citizens.

Our graduates' entire careers might develop advertising software that reaches millions, without engaging the larger questions of our lifetime for those millions.

Technology raises moral questions

There are major issues of debate in our scientific and technological community, with serious questions about bias, power and control.

Let's take a few examples from the headlines of this year:

1. We are increasingly seeing the influence of software algorithms in applications with life-changing impacts, such as criminal sentencing or employment. These software systems remain unmonitored "black boxes" that may be influenced by racial bias, special interests or simply bad science. We can't tell, as the systems are protected from scrutiny by intellectual property law. Or, in the case of deep learning, they are evolved systems too complex to be decoded by their very developers.

2. In biotechnology we see conversations about the use of CRISPR for germ-line editing - a domain in which genetic edits affect not just a patient but carry through to future generations. Others are debating gene drives, a way to short-circuit nature's checks and balances, allowing gene edits to spread to an entire population far more quickly than natural evolution could manage.

3. We're seeing the science community and major nations seek to address the challenge of climate change through geoengineering, making massive-scale edits to our planet's most fundamental systems.

These are not technological issues. They contain technological issues but they are not fundamentally technological issues. They are ethical ones. They require sophisticated experts to debate issues of ethics and society - to plan what, and if, we need to create.

It's as if we've encountered several simultaneous Manhattan Projects through the application of military DARPA funding, venture-capital investment and advancements in cloud-computing. We are seeing a whole host of life-changing technologies come to fruition after decades of basic research - and the rapid prototyping tools and production pipelines of the modern era have let us scale these new inventions faster than ever before.

And, as with the questions about ethics and the atomic bomb that led to the formation of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, we suddenly have important moral questions that only those creators have unique and important insights into.

We need to make sure STEM graduates working in these fields are able to engage with the toughest questions of our time: What, where and how should our new inventions be engaged?

Grounding experiments in empathy

I would like to see university curricula in STEM subjects expanded - to discuss whether we should develop certain technologies at all, with ethical concerns a common thread throughout our studies. The risks to society of anything else seem paramount.

I don't argue that all policy-makers should be scientists, but rather that scientists should include the world of policy and social impact in their remit. They should be able to credibly think about and discuss those impacts with the rest of the world.

Snow thought the scientific mind "impatient to see if something can be done" - which echoes the "bias to action" so prevalent in start-up culture.

Action can be important, and even governments, not known for agile movement, are starting to embrace learning-through-doing. Finland, for example, has a department of experimentation which aims to bring design-thinking experimentation into policy work.

But even design thinking, the darling methodology-of-the-moment, grounds experiments in empathy. The developers of solutions should themselves be engaged with those affected by their works, co-creating through a direct engagement with users, with customers, with clients, with citizens.

Teaching ethics through the arts

And how else do our universities teach empathy, ethics and citizenship than through our arts and humanities fields?

There may be specific questions of citizenship, of responsibility, that we feel any and all STEM graduates should engage with (as there may be basic numeracy, stats or scientific literacy required for any non-STEM-trained citizen of the digital age).

I make no special claim to know the precise content of these classes, or to prescribe the curriculum of our degree program. We must develop them together. Tangible examples include this crowd-sourced list of Computer Science Ethics courses compiled by Casey Fiesler at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Crises in medical research, such as the Tuskegee Syphllis Study, helped jump-start the fields of medical ethics and bioethics as well as concepts such as informed consent. Medical professionals now engage with complex questions of inclusion, representation, voice and agency.

These aren't elements of dosage or measurement, but rather touch upon more abstract ideas of rights, values, and meaning - core elements in our study of the humanities. It's time for the rest of the STEM field to engage with the same issues.

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STEAM not STEM: Why scientists need arts training

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Universities must train scientists to engage with the ethics of emerging technologies, rather than functioning as cogs in the engine of economic development. Integrating the arts into STEM can help.

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Opinion piece, a news story, academic piece, etc.

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Opinion piece, a news story, academic piece, etc.

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Consider the motivation behind the source.

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Do you think this source is reliable? Why or why not?

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Do you think this source is reliable? Why or why not?

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Consider the way it is written, how they make their argument, the evidence they use, etc.

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Consider the motivation behind the source.

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Do you think this source is reliable? Why or why not?

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Do you think this source is reliable? Why or why not?

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Consider the way it is written, how they make their argument, the evidence they use, etc.

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Based on what you have read in each of your sources, answer the following three questions:

1. What is the study of literature?

2. Why is it important?

3. Is it relevant to you now and in the future?

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1. who is the author- Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

2. What type of source is it-academic or intellectual forum?

3. When was it published-January 27, 2016

4. were was it published on The Conversation website

5. why was it published - highlight the benefits of using literary works to enhance student's understanding of complex real-world issues and challenge conventional approaches that heavily focus on traditional academic texts.

6. do you think this source is reliable - While the article provides valuable perspectives and insights, it's always recommended to cross-reference information and consult additional sources, especially scholarly research and academic literature, to develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Overall, the reliability of the article can be assessed based on the credibility of the author, the publication platform, and the content's alignment with established knowledge and scholarship in relevant fields.