Caring In Schools Is Not Enough: Community, Narrative, And The Limits Of Altertty

Educational Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 373-393

  Schutz, Aaron ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MILWAUKEE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0002364050     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00373.x     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986)
2. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Moral Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)
3. Barbara Thayer Bacon, "Caring and its Relationship to Critical Thinking," Educational Theory 43, no. 3 (1993):323-40.
4. Carol Maybach, "Investigating Urban Community Needs: Service Learning from a Social Justice Perspective," Education and Urban Society 28, no. 2 (1996): 224-36.
5. Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
6. See, for example, Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 43 and 184-87. Her point (see p. 184) is not that principles themselves become entirely unimportant, but that they become considerations among many others in the larger ethical activity of caring that I describe below.
7. See, for example, the symposium in Hypatia 5, no. 1 (1990).
8. See also Jean Grimshaw, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Deimut Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), among many others.
9. Hypatia, 121.
10. Running through Noddings's argument in Women and Evil is her conviction that the neglect of relation, the "separation" involved in, for example, becoming emotionally distant judges with respect to those we affect, is a central component of "the basic states of consciousness associated with evil" (p. 229).
11. Nel Noddings, "On Community," Educational Theory 46, no. 3 (1996): 252. This article will be cited as OC in the text for all subsequent references.
12. Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995). This book will be cited as PE in the text for all subsequent references.
13. Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 34. This book will be cited as C in the text for all subsequent references.
14. Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992), 16. This book will be cited as CCS in the text for all subsequent references.
15. In her earlier work, Noddings decides to represent the carer consistently with feminine pronouns, while she represents the cared-for with masculine pronouns (C, p. 4). I will use the female pronoun as the generic.
16. See Noddings, Women and Evil, especially.
17. Noddings, "Response," 125.
18. Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, "Essay Review," Teachers College Record 8, no. 2 (1985): 281.
19. Nel Noddings, "Stories in Dialogue: Caring and Interpersonal Reasoning," in Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education, ed. Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), 158.
20. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue. 2d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1984), 208.
21. See, especially, Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), chap. 3.
22. Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre, "Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves," Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 20, no. 1 (1990): 48.
23. Karl Kroeber, Rereading/Retelling: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 106
24. see also Louis Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 186.
25. Davies and Harre, "Positioning," 45.
26. Noddings, "Caring from a Feminist Perspective," in Ethics for Professionals in Education, ed. Kenneth A. Strike and P. Lance Ternasky (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), 45.
27. Jerome Bruner, "Self-Making and World-Making," Journal of Aesthetic Education 25, no. 1 (1991): 77.
28. Kroeber, Retelling, 34.
29. see also Mink, Historical Understanding.
30. See also, Carol Witherell, and Nel Noddings, "Prologue," in Witherell and Noddings, Stories Lives Tell.
31. To be an effective carer, however, a one-caring's knowledge of the other must extend beyond the boundaries of the classroom into their community and culture. Jaci Webb et. al. noted that in the school they examined, caring was "not negotiated across the various cultural and political borders that marked the social terrain of the neighborhood", Jaci Webb, Bruce Wilson, Dickson Corbett, and Rhonda Mordecai, "Understanding Caring in Context: Negative Borders and Barriers," The Urban Review 25, no. 1 (1993): 37. In fact, the practical knowledge demands of truly ideal caring are so great that some level of domination and even oppression in caring (especially for students who are marginal to a school community) is probably unavoidable, and in some (perhaps many) cases may make truly effective caring untenable.
32. For an exploration of the idea of the relational self in feminist theory
33. see Susan J. Heckman, Moral Voices. Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).
34. See Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
35. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1970), 59.
36. By equal I am referring to the level of "relation" with the cared for, which for Noddings is the key criterion. Bubeck notes an example that she asserts shows Noddings using a principle of "least harm" to decide between cared-fors
37. see Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice, 201. But in the case Bubeck cites, Noddings creatively escapes having to compare two cared-fors by deciding that helping one cared-for also helps the other cared-for become a one-caring (in giving up what he wanted for another) (C, p. 53).
38. Robert Bernasconi notes, "Levinas is not working with a pair of alternatives in opposition to each other, as Buber is when it is always a case of either I-Thou or I-It....[Levinas' concepts of] the saying and the said are such that each accompanies, supports, and yet subverts the other," in "Failure of Communication as Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue Between Buber and Levinas," in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 128.
39. Levinas has been accused by Paul Ricouer of engaging in "hyperbole, to the point of paroxysm," of taking his philosophy of alterity to the farthest excess: Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 338.
40. Simon Critchley, in Levinas, Basic Writings, 161.
41. Levinas cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 113
42. see also Levinas, Basic Writings, chap. 10.
43. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 128. Levinas's complete vision of a "fraternal" society is much more complex than I have space to discuss thoroughly here.
44. See Peperzak, Beyond, chap. 7 for a succinct summary.
45. Buber, I and Thou, 180.
46. See Bernasconi, "Failure of Communication," for a comparison of Buber and Levinas.
47. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958], 8. This book will be cited as HC in the text for all subsequent references.
48. Hannah Arendt, "A Reply," Review of Politics 15 (1953): 68-76.
49. Sandra Hinchman, and Lewis Hinchman, "Existentialism Politicized: Arendt's Debt to Jaspers," The Review of Politics 53 (Summer 1991): 445.
50. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 200.
51. I draw the idea of the "common project" from Maxine Greene.
52. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 2d. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 223. This book will be cited as BPF in the text for all subsequent references.
53. See Margaret Canovan, "A Case of Distorted Communication: A Note on Habermas and Arendt," Political Theory 11, no. 1 (February 1984): 105-16. and Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
54. Bickford, Dissonance, 171. For an interpreter who thinks action in Arendt's public is merely aesthetic
55. see Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
56. See, especially, Bickford's discussion of the importance of "listening" in "public" in Dissonance.
57. Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Political Children," in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995). This essay provides a rich discussion of the complexities involved in politicizing children and the many different ways this can be defined.
58. Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 5.
59. I have only lightly sketched the implications of Arcndt's work for education, here. I have attempted a fuller exploration elsewhere.
60. See Aaron Schutz, "Creating Local Public Spaces in Schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Green,"Curriculum Inquiry (in press). Anne Ruggles Gere and I argue, in "Service Learning and English Studies: Rethinking 'Public' Service," College English 60, no. 2 (1993), that an approach to service learning, reconceptualized as "public" service, might help initiate students into the kinds of practices Arendt envisioned.
61. Nel Noddings, "Conversation as Moral Education," Journal of Moral Education 23, no. 2 (1994): 115.
62. See Eleanor Honig Skoller, The In-Between of Writing: Experience and Experiment in Drabble. Duras. and Arendt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 111 and Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 211. The public/private distinction in Arendt, contrary to the reading of some in the past, does not represent an attempt to isolate women into the private, although, as Mary Deitz points out in "Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt," in Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995), her relation to feminism remains problematic.
63. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
64. A question posed by one of the reviewers for this journal.
65. Other care theorists have made similar observations about the need for individuals to have access to multiple practices of engagement.
66. See, for example, Carol Gilligan, Annie Rogers, and Lyn Mike! Brown, "Epilogue: Soundings into Development," in Making Connections, ed. Carol Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 314-329.
67. Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, 20. Benhabib argues the space of the salon is a "transgression" of public/intimate boundaries, which goes farther than I do here.
68. Paul Ricouer, Oneself, 179.
69. Joan C. Tronto, "Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care," Signs 12, no. 4 (1987): 644-63. and Julia T. Wood, Who Cares? Women, Care, and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
70. Paul Lichterman, in The Search For Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), shows that what look much like Arendtian "public" practices seem to reflect educated, professional ways of being in the modern world. Audrey Thompson, in "Surrogate Family Values: the Refeminization of Teaching," Educational Theory 47, no. 3 (1997): 315-39., makes a similar point about caring.