Nel Noddings

Nel Noddings
Nel Noddings
Born	1929
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Combines approaches from analytic and continental philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of education, Ethics

Nel Noddings (1929– ) is an American feminist, educationalist, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.

Biography

Nel Noddings received a bachelors degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State College in New Jersey, a masters degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University.

Nel Noddings worked in many areas of the education system. She spent seventeen years as an elementary and high school mathematics teacher and school administrator, before earning her PhD and beginning work as an academic in the fields of philosophy of education, theory of education and ethics, specifically moral education and ethics of care. She became a member of the Stanford faculty in 1977, and was the Jacks Professor of Child Education from 1992 until 1998. While at Stanford University she received awards for teaching excellence in 1981, 1982 and 1997, and was the associate dean or acting dean of the School of Education for four years. After leaving Stanford University, she held positions at Columbia University and Colgate University. She is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and the John Dewey Society. In 2002-2003 she held the John W. Porter Chair in Urban Education at Eastern Michigan University. She has been Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University since she retired in 1998.

Nel Noddings has 10 children and in 2009 had been married for 60 years. She has described her early educational experiences and her close relationships as key in her development of her philosophical position.

Contributions to philosophy

Noddings' first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan’s ground-breaking work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of Women and Evil (1989), and later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education and educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993) and Philosophy of Education (1995).

Besides contributing to philosophy, Noddings also works in the field of social psychology. Noddings is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Noddings' contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

Nel Noddings' relational ethics

Nel Noddings' approach to ethics of care has been described as relational ethics because it prioritizes concern for relationships. Like Carol Gilligan, Noddings accepts that justice based approaches, which are supposed to be more masculine, are genuine alternatives to ethics of care. However, unlike Gilligan, Noddings' believes that caring, 'rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness' is a more basic and preferable approach to ethics (Caring 1984, 2).

Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education

The key to understanding Noddings' ethics of care is to understand her notion of caring and ethical caring in particular.

Noddings believes that it would be a mistake to try to provide a systematic examination of the requirements for caring, nevertheless, she does suggest three requirements for caring (Caring 1984, 11-12). She argues that the carer (one-caring) must exhibit engrossment and motivational displacement, and the person who is cared for (cared-for) must respond in some way to the caring (1984, 69). Noddings' term engrossment refers to thinking about someone in order to gain a greater understanding of him or her. Engrossment is necessary for caring because an individual's personal and physical situation must be understood before the one-caring can determine the appropriateness of any action. 'Engrossment' need not entail, as the term seems to suggest, a deep fixation on the other. It requires only the attention needed to some to understand the position of the other. Engrossment could not on its own constitute caring; someone could have a deep understanding of another person, yet act against that person's interests. Motivational displacement prevents this from occurring. Motivational displacement occurs when the one-caring's behaviour is largely determined by the needs of the person for whom she is caring. On its own, motivational displacement would also be insufficient for ethical caring. For example, someone who acted primarily from a desire to accomplish something for another person, but failed to think carefully enough about that other person's needs (failed to be correctly engrossed in the other), would fail to care. Finally, Noddings believes that caring requires some form of recognition from the cared-for that the one-caring is, in fact, caring. When there is a recognition of and response to the caring by the person cared for, Noddings describes the caring as "completed in the other" (1984, 4).

Nel Noddings draws an important distinction between natural caring and ethical caring (1984, 81-83). Noddings distinguishes between acting because "I want" and acting because "I must". When I care for someone because "I want" to care, say I hug a friend who needs hugging in an act of love, Noddings claims that I am engaged in natural caring. When I care for someone because "I must" care, say I hug an acquaintance who needs hugging in spite of my desire to escape that person's pain, according to Noddings, I am engaged in ethical caring. Ethical caring occurs when a person acts caringly out of a belief that caring is the appropriate way of relating to people. When someone acts in a caring way because that person naturally cares for another, the caring is not ethical caring (1984, 79-80). Noddings' claims that ethical caring is based on, and so dependent on, natural caring (1984, 83, 206 fn 4). It is through experiencing others caring for them and naturally caring for others that people build what is called an "ethical ideal", an image of the kind of person they want to be.

Noddings describes wrong actions in terms of "a diminishment of the ethical ideal" and "evil". A person's ethical ideal is diminished when she either chooses or is forced to act in a way that rejects her internal call to care. In effect, her image of the best person it is possible for her to be is altered in a way that lowers her ideal. According to Noddings, people and organizations can deliberately or carelessly contribute to the diminishment of other's ethical ideals. They may do this by teaching people not to care, or by placing them in conditions that prevent them from being able to care (1984, 116-119). A person is evil if, in spite of her ability to do otherwise, she either fails to personally care for someone, or prevents others from caring. Noddings writes, "[when] one intentionally rejects the impulse to care and deliberately turns her back on the ethical, she is evil, and this evil cannot be redeemed" (1984, 115).

Criticisms of Noddings' relational ethics

Nel Noddings' ethics of care has been criticised by both feminists and those who favour more traditional, and arguably masculine, approaches to ethics. In brief, feminists object that the one-caring is, in effect, carrying out the traditional female role in life of giving while receiving little in return. Those who accept more traditional approaches to ethics argue that the partiality shown to those closest to us in Noddings' theory is inappropriate.

Noddings tends to use unequal relationships as a model for understanding caring. Philosopher and lesbian-feminist Sarah Lucia Hoagland argues that the relationships in question, such as parenting and teaching, are ideally relationships where caring is a transitory thing designed to foster the independence of the cared-for, and so end the unequal caring relationship. Unequal relationships, she writes, are ethically problematic, and so a poor model for an ethical theory. Hoagland argues that on Noddings' account of ethical caring, the one-caring is placed in the role of the giver and the cared-for in the role of the taker. The one-caring is dominant, choosing what is good for the cared-for, but gives without receiving caring in return. The cared-for is put in the position of being a dependent, with insufficient control over the nature of the caring. Hoagland believes that such unequal relationships cannot be morally good.

Selected Works

Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in Education (co-author with Paul J. Shore). New York: Teachers College Columbia University, 1984.
Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Publisher's promotion
Women and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Publisher's promotion
Constructivist Views on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (co-author with Robert B. Davis and Carolyn Alexander Maher). Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Monograph no. 4, Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1990.
Stories Lives Tell: Narrative and Dialogue in Education (co-author with Carol Witherell). New York: Teachers College Press, 1991.
The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education. Advances in Contemporary Educational Thought series, vol. 8. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992.
Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief. The John Dewey Lecture. New York: Teachers College Press, 1993.
Philosophy of Education. Dimensions of Philosophy series. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995.
Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics (co-edited with Suzanne Gordon, Patricia E. Benner). Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Awakening the Inner Eye: Intuition in Education (co-author with Paul J. Shore). Troy, NY: Educator's International Press, 1998.
Justice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education (co-author with Michael S. Katz and Kenneth A. Strike). Professional Ethics in Education series. New York: Teachers College Press, 1999. Publisher's promotion
Uncertain Lives: Children of Promise, Teachers of Hope (co-author with Robert V. Bullough). New York: Teachers College Press, 2001.
Educating Moral People. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002.
Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Publisher's promotion Review
Happiness and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Publisher's promotion
Critical Issues in Education: Dialogues and Dialectics (Co-author with Jack L. Nelson, Stuart B. Palonsky, and Mary Rose McCarthy). 2003
No Education Without Relation (Co-author with Charles Bingham, and Alexander M. Sidorkin). Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, 259. Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. Publisher's promotion
Educating Citizens for Global Awareness (editor). New York: Teachers College Press, 2005. Boston Research Center for the 21st Century Publisher's promotion
Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Publisher's promotion
Moral Matters: Five Ways to Develop the Moral Life of Schools (co-author with Barbara Senkowski Stengel, and R. Tom Alan). New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.

References

Anderson, Carol. 'EMU’s Porter Chair Noddings says addressing physical needs of students can improve success'. Eastern Michigan University press release. Oct 30th, 2002. http://www.emich.edu/univcomm/releases/noddings.html.
Flinders, D. J. 'Nel Noddings'. In Joy A. Palmer (ed.) Fifty modern thinkers on education: From Piaget to the present. London: Routledge, 2001.
Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. 'Some Concerns about Nel Noddings' Caring'. Hypatia 5 (1), 1990.
Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. 'Some Thoughts about Caring'. In Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics. Lawrence, Kans: University Press of Kansas, 1991.
Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Smith, M. K. 'Nel Noddings, the ethics of care and education'. In The encyclopaedia of informal education. www.infed.org/thinkers/noddings.htm, 2004.
Tong, Rosemarie. 'Nel Noddings's relational ethics'. In Feminine and Feminist Ethics. Belmost, Calif: Wadsworth, 1993.
O'Toole, K. 'Noddings: To know what matters to you, observe your actions'. fxStanford Online Report, February 4, 1998. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/1998/february4/noddings.html.

External links

Center for ethical deliberation, 'Feminist care ethics'. [1]
O'Toole, K. 'Noddings: To know what matters to you, observe your actions', Stanford online report, February 4, 1998.[2].
Smith, M. K. 'Nel Noddings, the ethics of care and education', The encyclopaedia of informal education, 2004. [3]
Feminist Ethics, Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy[4]
Nodding's editorial contributions to the field of psychology in Greater Good magazine. [5]