Nel Noddings Research Articles

An Interview with Nel Noddings, PhD

An Interview with Nel Noddings, PhD

Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, Nel Noddings, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 182.

Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War, Nel Noddings, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 182.

Happiness and Education:Tilting at windmills?

Abstract This essay explores the question Is Nel Noddings a visionary who sees past the constraints of contemporary education or is she, like Don Quixote, madly tilting at windmills in her description and defense of happiness as an educational aim?Viewing the educational aim of happiness as an ideal raises substantial challenges for the practicality of Noddings’s ideas.

In the Pursuit of Unhappiness: The ‘measuring up’ of early childhood education in a seamless system

Abstract Recent government attention to the coherence between early childhood and compulsory school curricula in Aotearoa/New Zealand has led to debates regarding the educational aims of different education sectors Concerns regarding a ‘push-down’ of compulsory school aims are highlighted in this article, with reference to Nel Noddings’s Happiness and Education and the problem of an increased ‘measuring’ of early childhood education aims and outcomes. It is argued that removal of seams between early childhood and primary education may lead to unhappiness in early childhood education characterised by increasing standardisation and regulation and decreasing engagement with the aims of education—with, in Noddings’s words, ‘aims-talk’.

Nel Noddings’ Care Theory and Outdoor Education

This article offers a comprehensive introduction to Nel Noddings' care theory, examining specific examples of when care theory can be useful for both analyzing current practices and establishing a way forward to strengthen the presence of Noddings'™ care theory in Outdoor education (OE). A broad-based approach was taken as a means to initiate further discussion and promote research of Nodding's care theory in OE, including its potential and implications.

Editors' Notes

We are pleased to present a combination of conceptual and research papers in this issue. A paper by Burke, Nolan, and Rheingold takes a comprehensive look at Nel Noddings' care theory and considers specific examples of when it can be useful for examining current practices and strengthening its presence in outdoor education. Jostad, Paisley, and Gookin present a unique paper investigating what students on semester-length courses at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) learn that they may not learn from shorter courses. Their findings are related to the concept of overlearning and begin to document what students learn on semester-based wilderness courses.

Beyond Care?

Care is a feature of all of our lives, all of the time. An analysis of Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence reveals that care and caring permeate complex dimensions of life in and after school and we ask here, if, on some accounts, care can do the work required of it. Acknowledging the significance of her contribution to care, we focus on the work of Nel Noddings suggesting that she pays insufficient attention to other emotions implicated in the work of morally appropriate care. We argue here that Noddings' version of care would benefit from the support of an ethical theory of the emotions, including a moralized form of compassion, if care in schools is to be both better understood and more likely realised.

Teaching and its predicaments

* Introduction David T. Hansen and Nicholas C. Burbules. * Reforms That Call for Teaching More Than You Understand Robert E. Floden. * Must We Motivate? Nel Noddings. * Teaching by the Numbers Robert Boostrom. * Teaching and the Tragic Sense of Education N. C. Burbules. * The Problems of Teacher-Student Relationships in Troubled Times Jo Anne Pagano. * Predicaments in Curriculum Deliberation Elaine Atkins. * The Complexities of Portfolio Assessment Kathryn H. Au and Sheila W. Valencia. * Understanding and Managing Classroom Dilemmas in the Service of Good Teaching Magdalene Lampert. * Being a Good Influence D. T. Hansen.

Letter from the Editorial Board

During a recent discussion with my class of pre-service teachers, questions of what to do with sensitive student information were raised: When should they “report” things like drug use, pregnancy, sexual activity, abuse, immigration status, illegal activity and when should those things be kept confidential? Is there a legal obligation to report these behaviors? Is there a moral or ethical one? To whom should such behaviors be reported? And what are the implications for a teacher who does or does not report these things? Every group of pre-service teachers I’ve worked with has posed these questions, and for many, it seems to be one of the issues that they are most concerned about handling properly. The issue is complex. At stake are issues of student trust and confidentiality as well as the teachers’ moral, ethical, professional, and legal responsibilities. Much of the literature on effective teaching points to building strong relationships with students; the work of Nel Noddings, Angela Valenzuela, and others illustrates the centrality of caring relationships to student success. To build these caring relationships, teachers work to “get to know” their students and work to make themselves available as a caring adult in their lives. At the same time, we live in an increasingly litigious society; my pre-service teachers frequently ask, “Can this get me in trouble?” when considering how they might counsel a student who confided a pregnancy or if they suspected a student of being engaged in illegal activity. Rarely could I provide a clear answer. The line between preserving student trust and fulfilling our moral, ethical, professional, and legal obligations as teachers and as human beings is blurry at best. Moreover, as teachers, we do not always share the same view on what advice is best to give; the counsel one teacher might give a pregnant teen seeking guidance on her options may be drastically different from that offered by another teacher. Recent events have brought questions of what teachers should and should not do concerning students’ confidential information into the spotlight. In June of 2011, Alabama’ sg overnor signed into law the Hammon-Beason Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (HB 56); one provision, Section 28 (currently suspended pending an appeal by the US Department of Justice), of this law requires schools to report the immigration status of all students and their families as part of an effort to crack down on and deport undocumented aliens. Suddenly my students’ concern about whether or not the immigration status of a student matters becomes much more high stakes. Although the law creates a legal mandate, for some teachers and school officials it also creates a moral dilemma - to report a student or her family as undocumented could lead to deportation or even the splitting of a family. While the bill does not prevent undocumented students from enrolling in and attending public schools in Alabama, the provision’s authors see it as a first step in challenging and reversing the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe which found that denying undocumented children equal access to public schools violated the “equal protection” clause of the Constitution. The day after the HB 56 became law, Foley Elementary School in Foley, Alabama saw 19 of its 223 Hispanic students withdraw; another 39 were absent. Many of those students who did come to school were confused and afraid – even those who are US citizens. Antiimmigration campaigners have co-opted teachers and school officials as policing agents,

"Philosophy of Education," by Nel Noddings

"Philosophy of Education," by Nel Noddings

Moral aspects of therapeutic education: a case study of life competence education in Swedish education

Educational philosophers and sociologists have pointed out the potential risks of an educational trend of therapy, which seems to have connotations with Western macro-discourses of individualisation, popularised psychology and privatisation of the public room. The overall purpose of this article is to discuss potential risks and possibilities regarding moral aspects of therapeutic approaches in education from a teacher perspective. I will present the non-mandatory Swedish topic Livskunskap, life competence education (LCE), in a case study in the field of therapeutic education. The article is based on a small, qualitative empirical study of teachers’ experiences of teaching LCE and observations of LCE lessons. The empirical material is analysed through two theoretical lenses, the first being critical aspects of therapeutic education, the second being an educational theory of the ethics of care, mainly developed by Nel Noddings.

A Fourth Subject Position of Care

Analyses of care work typically speak of three necessary roles of care: the care worker, the care recipient, and an economic provider who makes care materially possible. This model provides no place for addressing the difficult political questions care poses for liberal representative democracy. I propose to fill this space with a new caring role to connect the care unit to the political sphere, as the economic provider connects the care unit to the economic sphere. I call this role that of the “care claimant.” The labor of claiming care consists in the development, expression, and advancement of the interests of the care unit. The argument for employing this fourth care role begins by comparing Nel Noddings's phenomenological care unit to Sara Ruddick's family‐based analysis. It then moves to discuss the way Eva Kittay emphasizes the dependency of the charge and its political ramifications to illustrate the need for a care claimant. After distinguishing the care claimant from the other roles of care, I examine the power relationships in the care unit and the position of the care claimant in the public sphere.

Building Receptivity

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac emphasizes values of receptivity and perceptivity that appear to be mutually reinforcing, critical to an ecological conscience, and cultivatable through concrete and embodied experience. His priorities bear striking similarities to elements of the ethics of care elaborated by feminist philosophers, especially Nel Noddings, who notably recommended receptivity, direct and personal experience, and even shared Leopold’s attentiveness to joy and play as sources of moral motivation. These commonalities are so fundamental that ecofeminists can and should see Leopold as a philosophical ally. The three ecofeminist scholars who have devoted the most concerted attention to Leopold’s work argue that his Land Ethic is not, and does not provide a basis for, an ecofeminist ethic. I dispute the main criticisms of these scholars, and conclude that ecofeminists should attend more often to Leopold’s work, which extends possibilities for excellent praxis.

Implications of Care Theory by Nel Noddings in Environmental Values Education in Elementary Schools

Implications of Care Theory by Nel Noddings in Environmental Values Education in Elementary Schools

Friends, Foes, and Nel Noddings on Liberal Education

Let us call the first sort “narratives of decline.” They decry the fallen state of liberal education, identify performance gaps, pinpoint causes, and commend pathways to renewal. Undoubtedly, there are woeful failures, degradations, and perversions of practice in liberal education — although I might say defensively that any complex, institutionalized practice will display regrettable, sometimes even shocking, performance gaps. These critiques, however, are usually jeremiads, bemoaning widespread and systemic degradations. The putative etiology varies, from the abandonment of worthy curricular content to the failure to address the right questions, from the dominance of utilitarian concerns to the triumph of the research ethos, but the pronouncement is the same: the ideal is sound, but everywhere we are failing it, and the practice of liberal education is in decline. Usually, I find it difficult to embrace these worried “friends” of liberal education, because I disagree with their diagnosis of the problem or its supposed scale, because I reject their salvational vision of liberal education, or because their gloom seems willfully to ignore the everyday educational successes that bloom under their noses on their local campuses.

Relational Self, Nel Noddings’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics, and Education

In the past decades, the traditional western approach to ethics has been questioned, challenged, and criticized. The focal point of the critique is that western ethics is built on the notion of an independent, even autonomous, self. Critics note, “Kantian and consequentialist moral theories focus primarily on the rational decisions of agents taken as independent and autonomous individuals. Even virtue theory focuses on individuals and their dispositions.” Such ethics focus on “issues of fairness, equality, and individual rights, seeking impartial and abstract principles that can be applied consistently to particular cases.” In such ethics, individuals, “as instances of the general and timeless conception of person,” are privileged as the center of consideration, and ethical actions become meaningful only when they are seen as the originators of the actions. The problem with such an approach is that when the self is positioned as an independent agent and privileged as the originator, it has the power to see the other, to define the other, and to know the other. With or without good intentions for the other, this power is already an act of violence to the other. For Emmanuel Levinas, this philosophy of totalizing absorbs, identifies the other, and makes the other the same. In Sharon Todd’s words, the “very otherness” is “at the heart of hideous inequity and social violence.”

The Question of Ethical Citizenship

Engaging the work of Nel Noddings and Emmanuel Levinas makes sense for one part of Guoping Zhao’s project, which is to think about the grounds for a relational ethic that is not so “ontologically particular” that it “cannot be applied or extended to general relations.” This quest for a universalizable conception of the subject is important to Zhao’s project of moving relational ethics from its preoccupation with the dyadic relationship between teacher and student to the more complicated challenge of educating young people for ethical citizenship. But this is where both Noddings and Levinas prove to be curious choices. Both are skeptical of efforts to smooth over the very real differences between the ethical, as each understands it, and the political. The demands of political life are such that the ethical is at best a perpetual question, and at worst, a devastating impossibility. This puts the very concept of “the ethical citizen” in question. This recognition of the limits of relational ethics troubles the second part of Zhao’s project, which is to harness Levinas’s thinking about subjectivity to the task of educating for ethical citizenship.

Philosophy of Education. (2nd edition). By Nel Noddings

Philosophy of Education. (2^nd edition). By Nel Noddings

A preliminary discussion of care theory

Caring is a core value of nursing science, therefore studying and improving the Care Theory is essential for nursing science to became an independent subject. In 1980s, Carol. Cilligan one of the western feminists, first discussed the importance of the care in moral value for women. Then based on the theory of existentialism, Nel Noddings, an American educationalist made depth research on the structure of care and developed the Ethics of Care. Nowadays, majority of studies on the Care Theory were in Western, especially in American and it still in the early stage. However, in China, there is a complete system of ethics. Therefore how to integrate the Chinese traditional ethics with the Ethics of Care from West is very important to develop Nursing Science. Key words: Nursing; Care; Ethics

Political Pedagogy towards Democratic Education: Educating Students to Care about Local and Global Injustice

Introduction The aim of this article is to explore how educators can assist students in developing attitudes that are engaged and sympathetic to local and global inequalities and injustices. Primarily, the work of Nel Noddings (1984, 1992, 2002, 2006, 2007) on care and caring will be used to examine how this goal might best be accomplished. The work of Slavoj Zizek (1989, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2008a) will also be addressed as it relates to Noddings' care project. My goal in reflecting on Noddings' work in this context is to better understand how college instructors can positively teach students (and pre-service teachers) to care about those individuals (and groups of people) that are separated from the students by a myriad of social, geographic, economic, and political factors. By working through the theoretical lens that Noddings provides, it is my hope to gain a greater sense of how to guide students to openness to and awareness of issues of local and global importance. Starting at Zizek The epigraph to this article may seem out of place. However, I would assert that Slavoj Zizek's comment is an outstanding, if unorthodox, place to jump into the discourse of care. My rationale for using one of Zizek's most popular Youtube rants to begin the discussion of Noddings' work on care and teaching students to care about issues of social and political import is based on the appearance that it seems so at odds with conventional common sense and possibly also with Noddings' views. Yet, this initial impression of incongruity, in my opinion, does not bear out. In fact, I think there is something remarkably similar in their positions. The point Zizek is making is one of his most profound and is right in front of all of us everyday--we prioritize who and what is important to us. Some things and some people are more important to us than others (usually family and friends) and simply saying we the world does not cut it. This is similar to Noddings' contention that it is difficult to care for the world. It seems that Zizek and Noddings have a common understanding and distaste for the paltry and emotionally impoverished view that love and care cannot be universalized in such a global manner without reducing the meaning of those terms beyond the constituent elements of their definitions. Further, it seems that Zizek and Noddings are both rejecting the platitude of universal love as being naive and as a disappointing inversion of the true principle that supposedly makes up such statements. Zizek's provocative statement that is evil may be shocking, but it is difficult to escape his dramatic assertion--we care more for some things and people than others. The implications of his statement lead us back to why Noddings' work is so vitally important to how we teach students to care about individuals and groups that are different from us and separated from us by proximity, gender, class, ethnic background, language, and intellectual tradition. The remainder of the article clarifies the importance of Noddings' work to post-secondary education. In the next sections, I will review Noddings' work on care and caring and relate it to how educators may possibly guide students towards more benevolent attitudes on a global scale. Noddings on Care and Caring About Nel Noddings' Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) is an outstanding achievement in relational moral theory. At the heart of Noddings' theory is a rootedness in lived experience that critiques the orthodox approach of abstracted, noetic moral schemes and that instead offers to vividly bring moral theory back into the real world. Noddings makes clear early on in this text why she thinks this feminine approach that relies on certain concreteness fills a historical void: Women, in particular, seem to approach moral problems by placing themselves as nearly as possible in concrete situations and assuming personal responsibility for the choices to be made. …