Moral Maturation Research Articles

"An Attitude of Noticing": Mary Oliver's Ecological Ethic

For Mary Oliver, the act of writing is at once a means of experiencing most fully her interbeing with the observable world and of rehearsing the provisional distance between self and other upon which this sensation of merging depends. At stake in this effort is Oliver's self-proclaimed “work” of “loving the world,” a profound ambition that turns not upon the twin gestures of assimilation or exclusion but rather a rigorous, dynamic curiosity, what she calls “an attitude of noticing” (Swann xiv). Such writing-as-mindfulness is hard-earned, as it exchanges the individual ego and its attendant parsing of experience into tidy oppositions for a capaciousness of being that forms the bedrock of compassion—one's ability to “love the world.” Integrative at its core, Oliver's poetry facilitates neither self-realization nor self-abdication but the paradoxically selfless practice of full presence. As such, the transformative power of Oliver's work resides less in its occasional voice of outcry or admonition (witnessed, most recently, in Redbird) than in its resistance to precisely those actions we often think of as prerequisites for making change: repudiation of that which we consider wrong or unjust buoyed by judgment and will. In contrast, Oliver's devotion to “loving the world” is achieved primarily via acute attention and its spawn, awareness. Consequently, Oliver's work cannot be accounted for by critical narratives that privilege poetic “breakthroughs” or the “remaking” of style as evidence of creative or even moral maturation—a partial explanation, surely, for the notable dearth of scholarly attention paid to this major American poet.1

Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults - A Review

Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults is a brilliant examination of the spiritual and religious lives of 18 ߝ 23 year olds. Through vigorous quantitative and qualitative research, Christian Smith and Patricia Snell find that emerging adults, while no less religious than twentysomethings of previous generations, tend to have incongruous sets of beliefs and sets of behaviors. In addition, Smith and Snell, reveal that despite initially tepidity, emerging adults desire to have meaningful relationship with adults and that these relationships fortify religious beliefs and galvanize moral maturation. Souls in Transition is an important resource to higher education professionals who seek to understand the moral, religious and spiritual climate of today’s college student.

Aprender a aprender, educação superior e desenvolvimento moral

A constituição da atitude de aprender a aprender merece atenção na medida em que é influenciada pelo estágio de desenvolvimento moral do estudante. Este artigo retoma características do processo de amadurecimento moral da criança ao adulto, detalhadas por Habermas (1989), relacionando-as à formação de conceitos tal como foi investigada por Vigotski (2000). O objetivo é indicar caminhos para a afirmação de uma postura adequada que facilite a aprendizagem no âmbito universitário e estimule a construção de um relacionamento ideal em sala de aula, em que os papéis do professor e do aluno estejam delineados com clareza.

Cultivating Virtue?

but he can grow them, conditioning the soil to nurture the growth of the seed potatoes he has to work with. A university cannot make good graduates, but it can nurture their production. It can foster the kind of environment that encourages moral maturation and growth.

From Obedience to Autonomy: Moral Growth in the Little House Books

�� ��� Children's fiction, like much fiction for adults, frequently takes as its subject the moral growth of its protagonist. The Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder trace Laura's growth in moral awareness and moral development from early childhood through her first employment, her courtship by Almanzo, and her marriage. Laura's moral maturation is rich and multilayered, but at the heart of the Little House books, and shaping their progression as one multivolumed novel, is the theme of obedience giving way to autonomy, literally moral self-rule. Laura's moral development throughout the seven books of the original series is hardly unusual or idiosyncratic. Indeed, her growth closely follows the pattern laid out in Jean Piaget's ground-breaking The Moral Judgment of the Child, in which deference to rules laid down by others gives way to a growing respect for moral rules as selflegislated: Autonomy follows upon heteronomy; the rule of a game appears to the child no longer as an external law, sacred in so far as it has been laid down by adults; but as the outcome of a free decision and worthy of respect in the measure that it has enlisted mutual consent (65). Laurence Kohlberg could easily map Laura's growth onto his six stages of moral development: she grows from stage-one heteronomous morality, where she follows externally imposed rules to avoid externally imposed sanctions, to stage-six morality, where she recognizes that moral rules are binding on her because she legislates them for herself. Although I shall argue that Laura's moral development, as presented by Wilder, follows the Piaget-Kohlberg pattern quite remarkably, it also reflects some facets of moral development that are distinctively female, as articulated by Carol Gilligan. Laura develops her moral personality in close connection with her family