Reclaiming Community

Educational Theory

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 143-159

  Abowitz, Kathleen Knight ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039006321     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00143.x     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Shane Phelan, "All the Comforts of Home: The Geneology of Community," In Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Christine DiStefano (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 239.
2. George Manning, Kent Curtis, and Steve McMillen, Building Community: The Human Side of Work{Cincinnati: Thomson Executive Press), (emphasis mine).1996xix.
3. For further commentary on this point Nel Noddings, "On Community", Educational Theory 46, no. 3 (1996): 245-67.
4. Michael Gardiner, "Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective," Theory, Culture and Society, 13, no. 2 (1996): 123.
5. Nicholas C. Burbules and Suzanne Rice, "Dialogue Across Differences: Continuing the Conversation," In Teaching for Change: Addressing Issues of Difference in the College Classroom, ed. Kathryn Geismar and Guitele Nicoleau (Cambridge: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1993), 9.
6. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
7. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interrupts: Critical Reflections on the 'Postsocialist' Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). These books will be cited as JP and JI in the text for all subsequent references.
8. In some ways, this opposition has replaced the modernistic dualism of community and individual, which has been well-documented by postmodern, feminist, and other contemporary scholars.
9. My focus in this work is on educational communities, especially those in public, K-12 institutions. Certainly many of the ideas can apply to higher education and other types of non-institutionalized communities, but the notion of community within a public institutional setting requires specialized concepts and theoretical development that may not easily transfer to other kinds of community life.
10. Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992), 74.
11. For a more complete articulation of a feminist-pragmatist model of learning community, see Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Making Meaning of Community in an American High School (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, in press). An interesting example of a somewhat similar project, using case-study data and a critical-postmodern theoretical model, is William G. Tierney, Building Communities of Difference: Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, in Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series, ed. Henry A. Giroux and Paulo Frierc (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey, 1993).
12. Communitarianism, an intellectual and social movement originating in contemporary critiques of liberalism, has been articulated most vividly in philosophy in Alisdaire Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and Alisdaire Maclntyre, Whose Justicel Whose Rationality! (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press). Maclntyre espouses a neo-Aristotelian ideal of community, not in keeping with the philosophical and political commitments of pragmatists or feminists.1988.
13. My critique of these theorists should not be understood as a critique of their work or positions writ large, for I make considerable use of the scholarship of these thinkers, particularly Young and Fraser, in my own work (see Knight Abowitz, Making Meaning of Community in an American High School). Yet I believe that these thinkers provide useful examples of how and why scholars reject community ideals, and therefore wish to examine these aspects of their work.
14. It is important to note that Young and Fraser, both political theorists, are primarily concerned with the pursuit of justice. Community, in this pursuit, denotes unjust social arrangements and as such is deemed inappropriate for public realms. Most schools are, teehnically, public spaces, yet in my view they represent unique public spheres with special political and social requirements. Among these requirements are the nurturing and sustenance of human growth through associated living; a communal model can respond to this requirement.
15. Elizabeth Ellsworth, Teaching Positions: Difference, Pedagogy, and the Power of Address (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 85.
16. Nicholas C. Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).
17. Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 1993).
18. Charlotte Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press This book will be cited as PF in the text for all subsequent references., 1996), 275.
19. Burbules and Rice, "Dialogue Across Difference," 10.
20. Cherry Moraga, "La Guerra," In This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherry Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (New York: Women of Color Press, 1981), 33.
21. Charlene Haddock Seigfried's work in this area is perhaps best known; among her numerous contributions to this literature is "Shared Communities of Interest: Feminism and Pragmatism," in a theme issue, for which she served as editor, of Hypatia 8, no. 2 (1993): 1-14.
22. Her most recent book, Pragmatism and Feminism, carries this same theme. In education, where pragmatism has traditionally been a center of philosophical interest, the marriage of pragmatism with various feminist perspectives is beginning to be explored. For a sample of this work, see.
23. Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, "The Nurturing of a Relational Episternology," Educational Theory 47, no. 2 (1997): 239-60.
24. I emphasize a dialogical rather than an assimilationist model of union for feminism and pragmatism; their areas of difference are not to be muted in this union but scrutinized for their potential theoretical and practical insights.
25. William James Quoted in Phyllis Rooney, "Feminist-Pragmatist Rcvisionings of Reason, Knowledge, and Philosophy," Hypatia 8, no. 2 (1993): 17.
26. Simone de Beauvoir, In her classic work The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books), pursues the construction of woman as "Other" to man/human1989.
27. Other hybrids that are potentially well-positioned for this work include the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West for example, in Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993) or critical pragmatism in Cleo H. Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism: Poststructural Investigations in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988).
28. Christine DiStefano, "Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism," In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1993), 77.
29. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1988) describes sympathy as "an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other." Sandra Bartky notes that the English term sympathy "has undergone crass commercialization, as in the saccharine Hallmark 'sympathy' card," thereby shaping and distorting our understanding of this term. Bartky helpfully and simply defines the term as "feeling-with." See Sandra L. Bartky, "Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler," in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 181.
30. For more on empathy, see, for example, Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
31. Jane Roland Martin, The SchoolHome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
32. Jim Garrison, Dewey and Eros: Wisdom and Desire in the Art of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).
33. M. Regina Leffers, "Pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey Inform the Ethic of Care," Hypatia 8, no. 2 (1993): 64-77.
34. Gregory Fernando Pappas, "Dewey and Feminism: The Affective and Relationships in Dewey's Ethics," Hypatia 8, no. 2 (1993): 78-95.
35. It is important to note here that Noddings, for example, explicitly constructs an "ethic of care," and that no classical pragmatists labeled their own work in such a way. I use the term "ethic of care" in a generic way, not to summon explicitly any one ideal but to refer more generally to the relational ethic that prioritizes moral deliberation within the scene of human interdependence and sympathetic interaction.
36. Rational processes, as traditionally defined, are those defended with evidence, argumentation, and notions of objectivity. Irrational is a label often used in opposition, to refer to various positions that disregard the norms of rationality. The label "irrational" is almost always used to diminish one's position as overly emotional, subjective, or irrelevant to public problem-solving. I am using the term "postrational" to refer to a desired expansion of the discourses on rationalism. I borrow from DiStefano's use of the term. In "Dilemmas of Difference," she outlines three forms of the relation between feminism and Western rationalism: (1) feminist rationalism, which seeks to repair women's exclusion from the rationalist paradigm in their historical construction as less rational and more natural than men, (2) feminist anti-rationalism, a position which celebrates "the feminized irrational, invoking a strong notion of difference against the gender-neutral pretensions of a rationalist culture that opposes itself to nature, the body, natural contingency, and intuition," and (3) postrationalism, which attempts to "transcend the discourse of rationalism" by "simultaneously disengaging from the assumptions of generic humanism on the one hand and feminism construed as a theory and politics for the subject 'woman' on the other." (DiStefano, "Dilemmas of Difference,"). Postrationalism is a construct that allows us to acknowledge difference without ceasing to scrutinize critically differences in their shifting and complex contexts.66-67.
37. Pappas, "Dewey and Feminism," 78.
38. Andrea M. Jaggar, "Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason," In justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995): 179-202.
39. Dewey, quoted in Seigfied, Pragmatism and Feminism, 224.
40. John Dewey As quoted in Garrison, Dewey and Eros, 37.
41. Pappas, "Dewey and Feminism," 82.
42. Emily Robertson, "Reconceiving Reason," In Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education, Ed. Wendy Kohli (New York: Routledge, 1995), 124.
43. Dewey's choice of the word sympathy is no doubt deliberate. Beings in sympathy are in relation to one another; they potentially share resources, problems, and interests. Beings in sympathy are not necessarily in loving or affectionate relations with one another; they are connected, however, through associated activities of all kinds. Therefore the emotional possibilities of persons in sympathy with one another run the gamut of human affect, ever/thing from anger to distrust to kindness and compassion. This point is important to make; some conceptions of an ethic of care (see Nodclings, Caring) have potentially further characterized a so-called "feminine" ethic as one of only nurturing emotion. As stated, I believe a feminist-pragmatist values affect that fosters or maintains communication. This standard, then, allows us to value reflective discourse over anger, but at the same time to understand that expressed anger will sometimes help us more clearly communicate with one another over sensitive issues.
44. Noddings calls an ethic of care a "feminine" ethic, saying that it draws from "feminine," maternal virtues such as compassion and empathy.
45. Marilyn Friedman, "Beyond Caring: The De-Moralization of Gender," In Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, 61-77.
46. Pappas, "Dewey and Feminism," 84.
47. William De La Torre, "Multiculturalism: A Redefinition of Citizenship and Community," Urban Education, 31, no. 3 (1996), 204.
48. John DeweyThe Moral Writings of, ed. James Gouinlock (New York: Hafner Books, 1976), xxi.