Noddings and Bauman - teaching method

The most serious limitation of philosophy in terms of this book arises from its goal, which is different from my own. The goal of philosophy is usually to extract general truths from reflections on life, whereas my own purpose is to seek to understand specific moral situations and dilemmas. Even more than a practical philosophy, what I really need might be termed a philosophy of practice. The most useful approach of this kind is to be found in the work of educational philosopher Nel Noddings. Second, for my own purposes I need an approach that moves away from the generalities of traditional philosophical schemes and takes into consideration the agency of individuals, especially in a postmodern world in which overarching philo-sophical programs are a thing of the past and in which cultural and individual values are likely to come into conflict. Such an approach is offered by philosopher and social scientist Zygmunt Bauman. Nel Noddings’ (1984) book Caring, subtitled A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, has been one of the most important influences on my own thinking. Noddings sees morality as inhering not within individuals but in the relation between them. She examines the nature of what she calls the “caring relation,” the moral relation rooted in the “human affective response” (p. 3). Noddings takes relation as “ontologically basic” (p. 3), that is, “human encounter and affective response” are “a basic fact of human existence” (p. 4). She sees the caring relation as comprising an essentially unequal pair of the “one-caring” and the “cared-for” (p. 4), a relationship instantiated both by the mother-child relation and the teacher-student relation. In her book she explores the fundamental question of “how to meet the other morally” (p. 4). Many aspects of Noddings’ work appeal to me. She recognizes the morally colored nature of human relations while also acknowledging that in our efforts to do the right and good thing, “we shall not have absolute principles to guide us” (p. 5). In fact, she rejects the idea of ethical (i.e., what I call moral) principles and rules as “ambiguous and unstable” things that “separate us from each other” (p. 5); rather, she seeks to recognize and “preserve the uniqueness of human encounters”: “Since so much depends on the subjective experience of those involved in ethical encounters, conditions are rarely ‘sufficiently similar’ for me to declare that you must do what I must do” (p. 5). Yet, in order to escape relativism, she maintains that the caring attitude is “universally accessible” (p. 5). Finally, her account of the caring relation is what she describes as “an essay in practical ethics” (p. 3), and I personally have found her conceptualization of the caring relation, in all its complexity, to be of more practical help in approaching the moral issues of my own profession than anything else I have found in the literature of moral philosophy. A second writer, on whom I draw somewhat less, has also been a strong influence. In a series of books and articles, Zygmunt Bauman (e.g., 1993, 1994, 1995) has considered what has happened and may happen to morality in the postmodern age—an age in which the “grand narratives” and overarching moral and philosophical schemes have all been called into question, and the world “has lost its apparent unity and continuity” (Bauman, 1994, p. 16). Interestingly enough, Bauman believes that the end of the moral certainties offered by institutionalized moralities such as those of religion and politics does not mean the end of morality but instead is a liberating develop-ment that serves to “reinvigorate moral responsibilities” (p. 40) and allows us the freedom to reach for our own inner,
personal morality while fundamentally rethinking the role of values in the public sphere. I find in Bauman’s work strong support both for my own belief that ELT is a postmodern occupation par excellence (B.Johnston, 1999a, 1999b; see also Hargreaves, 1994) and for my continuing belief in humankind’s fundamental moral sense.