The necessity of a relational ethics alongside Noddings’ ethics of care in narrative inquiry

Abstract

Amidst a winter snow storm we drove slowly and carefully to our research site. Leaving much earlier than usual we wanted to be there to greet the indigenous youth who we had come to know in the process of inquiring into their ongoing identity making. We came to know them over several months in a junior high school arts club and had developed relationships with them that were marked by care. In attending to care, Noddings (1984) offered us a way to think about ethics. Yet Noddings did not explicitly turn her attention to an ethics for research, rather her focus was on an ethics of care in moral education. Drawing on our work alongside indigenous youth we show how these four components of an ethics of care shaped our narrative inquiry and show how a relational ethics builds on, and extends, an ethics of care in narrative inquiry.