On this page, you will find some of my written work regarding the field of education, along with other external publications that highlight my work with students.
How Should Schools Balance Teacher Agency in Professional Learning with Organizational Change?
The following essay was written in the fall of 2020 in tandem with ORLA-5052 - How People Learn: Implications for Educational Leadership, a core course in the Klingenstein Center's Ed.M. program.
I. Introduction When it comes to engaging students in learning, research has indicated that a student’s sense of agency is critically important. Providing students with authentic opportunities to direct their learning process signals that teachers value their perspective and expertise, thereby increasing their sense of belonging and freeing up cognitive bandwidth to learn. Moreover, an experience of agency can also increase a student’s intrinsic motivation by allowing them to connect their experience in the classroom to questions, topics, or subject matter that is directly relevant to their own life. Yet, student agency is not just important to learning as it transpires in the classroom. Twenty-first century learning skills, such as metacognition and self-regulation, necessitate a high degree of independence, which means educators interested in equipping students with enduring skills for life-long learning should actively seek to promote student agency in their classrooms.
Perhaps not surprisingly, recent research regarding what constitutes effective adult learning echoes this emphasis on agency. Much like our students, adults are more likely to engage professional learning when provided with authentic opportunities to choose educational paths based on their own interest, experience, and classroom needs. Accounting for adult agency thus seems critical when developing an effective professional learning system, yet it also raises questions when it comes to a school’s ability to implement broader organizational initiatives for change. The recent and rapid advances in neuroscience, systems psychology, and supporting pedagogies means schools are having to adapt and grow in ways like never before, and this requires substantial coordination on the part of school leaders, particularly with respect to professional learning, and this can sometimes be at odds with adults directing their own learning pathways. Put as a question then, then how can schools balance the need for teacher agency in professional learning (self-directed) while also harmonizing these efforts to grow the school in a specific direction (institutionally-directed)? This paper seeks to explore this tension, identifying potential challenges and opportunities when it comes to broader organizational growth initiatives. As Allison Rodman puts it, “the challenge for district and school leaders is to support and foster social construction [i.e. provide for agency] while also maintaining quality control.”
II. Identifying Desirable Autonomy
Not all forms of autonomy are the same. In their exploration of the relationship between student voice, motivation, and engagement, Eric Toshalis and Michael Nakkula note how the student agency is not a singular phenomenon but rather something that occurs along a spectrum, ranging from expression to leadership (see Figure 1). In each successive step on the ladder, students experience increasing levels of influence, responsibility, and decision-making power, which dovetails with the need for teachers to share authority, cultivate trust, and view students as capable stakeholders. This continuum is relevant to our conceptualization of adult agency, particularly when seeking to determine which types of adult agency are compatible with broader organizational change initiatives (in the above figure, we might replace the term “students” with “learners”). Indeed, many teachers would likely consign their current experience of professional learning to the categories on the left end of the spectrum, where they are invited to share their opinions but are denied any real decision-making when it comes to their learning experience. Not surprisingly, professional learning of this ilk is ineffective. The columns on the right-hand side of the spectrum (partnership, activism, and leadership), however, are more reflective of the research recommendations for agency in adult learning. For example, Allison Rodman’s suggestion of utilizing a staff-needs assessment that solicits input from and engages teachers in the design process would fall under “Partnership,” while Yvonne Trotter’s recommendation that “adults need to plan their own educational paths based on their interest and their classrooms” is a form of agency that falls within the realm of “Leadership”. Additionally, we might allocate Vanessa Vega’s suggestion that teachers need “authority to make decisions regarding curriculum, the processes of their own learning, and aspects of school governance” to “Activism.” Returning then to our question about how to provide opportunities for adult agency as a requisite to learning without compromising coordination toward institutional initiatives, we can restrict our focus to agency that qualifies as partnership, activism, and leadership. How might professional learning models that approach adults through these frames either hinder or facilitate organizational change?
III. When Autonomy Goes Awry
When seeking to promote teacher agency via partnership, activism, or leadership, the context of shared mission or purpose is of critical importance. When “everyone in the building, including students, knows and understands the purpose of the school (its mission, vision, and values),” teachers are philosophically and pedagogically coordinated in their choices regarding professional learning. In such a climate, teacher autonomy is not at odds with broader change initiatives but rather aligned with it. Advocating for teacher agency in professional learning in a context without this sense of shared purpose, however, is likely to impede effective change initiatives. Here, individual teachers operate independently, making choices that reflect their own visions about what constitutes excellent teaching and learning, which may or may not be supported by existing research, resulting in what Tooley and Connally refer to as an “egg-crate culture” or what Roland Barth refers to as “parallel play.” Moreover, exercising agency in this manner can have profound ramifications for student equity. While variation in teaching styles is unavoidable (and, indeed, often desirable), extreme teacher independence can have an adverse impact on the cognitive load of students. When students are subjected to radically different learning experiences in the course of a day, having to switch between classroom structures, assessment mechanisms, activities, and differing pedagogical values, they are essentially asked to learn a new system every time they enter a different classroom. For socially marginalized students that already struggle with bandwidth depletion, the effect of this switching is likely to have a disproportionate impact even if the pedagogical choices of their teachers are individually sound. To that end, autonomy without shared purpose is not only likely to thwart organizational change but is also likely to exacerbate pre-existing inequities among students.
Yet, even if a school were to successfully develop and inculcate a shared sense of purpose with respect to excellent teaching and learning, granting teachers autonomy in the professional learning process assumes that educators have the requisite skill sets and capacities to self-assess the gaps between this shared vision and their current state. Unfortunately, Tooley and Connally note how “few good tools exist for educators to assess the quality of what is available, and whether it is likely to meet their needs,” and even if educators were to access such tools, “educators do not necessarily have sufficient data or skills to determine where their practice is strong and where it needs improvement. This is not a specific criticism of educators: research indicates that humans, regardless of profession, are inherently not good at knowing what they do not know.” TNTP affirms this finding in “The Mirage,” citing how teachers with low evaluation ratings tend to view them as inaccurate, self-rating their performance much higher. All that is to say, even in contexts with a shared vision of teaching and learning, simply granting teachers autonomy in professional learning does not ensure that they will target areas where they have room to grow, simply by virtue of the fact that humans generally struggle to accurately identify our weaknesses. This is all the more true in contexts without such a shared mission.
IV. Collaborative Autonomy and Organizational Change
The above observations about shared purpose and self-assessment suggest that, in order for teacher autonomy to be compatible with effective organizational change, the autonomy must be collaborative in nature. This might seem counterintuitive at first glance, yet this observation accords with the Toshalis and Nakkula’s spectrum of student agency from earlier in this paper, where partnership, activism, and leadership are framed as deeply collaborative processes. These are not instances of individuals making choices in a vacuum but rather adults “directing collective activities.” To that end, when schools seek to design professional learning experiences, it’s critical that they first attend to a co-construction of shared purpose and mission of their specific context. It’s worth taking a moment to note that a clear vision of excellent teaching and learning, while critical to effective teacher learning, has remained elusive, though Vanessa Vega suggests that this idea of “collective construct[ion] and re-construct[ion] [of] a shared vision of effective teaching for the local school context” is the very purpose of professional development. Facilitating such co-construction is clearly challenging work, though identifying competing commitments to align organizational goals with individuals goals is one way schools might seek to inculcate that shared sense of purpose.
Once structures for co-constructing a shared sense of purpose are established, schools should then seek to develop a data collection structure that allows teachers to communicate their needs and interests when it comes to their learning - something almost universally recommended by research on effective professional development. That said, it’s important that schools capture this data in tandem with other information about the student learning experience and student learning outcomes, which can help mitigate the challenges around relying solely on unreliable teacher self-assessments that we saw earlier. By drawing from a range of information, schools can then develop targeted professional learning systems that seek to bridge the gap between the current state of the organization and the desired end goal as articulated in the shared vision. Yet, this sort of needs-assessment on its own would only qualify as a form of consultation or participation under our model of teacher agency, which is why it’s also important that, once identified, schools engage teachers in the actual design of professional learning to shift the adult experience into the desired realms of partnership, activism, and leadership. Again, it’s worth reiterating that such work is highly collaborative, allowing for both collective ownership over the learning process and providing opportunities for teachers themselves to shape the direction of their learning.
V. Conclusion
Most teachers can recognize the challenge of providing their students authentic opportunities for choice while also maintaining rigorous, shared standards regarding targeted learning goals. Cultivating student ownership over those learning goals takes time, and this ownership is often closely linked to the development of caring, trusting relationships between student and teacher. Indeed, relationship-building can be a slow process but it’s ultimately time well spent. Once students come to recognize that both they and the teacher have a shared stake in reaching learning standards that they both value, students will take increased ownership over this work in such a way that facilitates the realization of a common objective.
In many ways, adults are no different. Too often, however, professional learning initiatives do not value the expertise or perspectives of teachers, while at the same time teachers themselves are too content to operate as independent agents. There is space for autonomy in professional learning that comports with coordinated institutional change, but this autonomy must be collaborative in nature, opening up space for teachers to co-construct a shared sense of purpose, reflect on myriad data that speaks to the ways in which the school has or has not yet realized that purpose, and then collaboratively planning adult learning accordingly. It’s worth noting that such a model is a shift away from professional development “delivery” to growing a sustained, embedded, recurring system in which learning can flourish, which requires both protected space and time. Yet, to quote Tooley and Connally, “By focusing on developing a PD system rather than specific activities, we can create more consistency and continuity in PD, and staying power when leadership turns over at various levels.” It is in such a system that I believe change is possible.
Works Cited
Barth, Roland S. “Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse.” Educational Leadership 63.6 (2006): 8-13.
Bayar, Adem. “The Components of Effective Professional Development Activities in terms of Teachers’ Perspective.” International Online Journal of Education Sciences6.2 (2014): 319-327
Darling-Hammond, Linda, Maria E. Hyler, and Madelyn Gardner. Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute, 2017.
Dweck, Carol S., Gregory M. Walton, and Geoffrey L. Cohen. Academic Tenacity: Mindsets and Skills that Promote Long-Term Learning. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2014.
Easton, Lois Brown. “From Professional Development to Professional Learning.” Phi Delta Kappan (2008): 755-761.
Kegan, Robert and Lisa Laskow Lahey. “The Real Reason People Won’t Change.” Harvard Business Review (2001): 84-92.
Quigley, Alex, Daniel Muijs, and Eleanor Stringer. Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning: Guidance Report. Education Endowment Fund, 2017.
Raue, Steve, Suk-Han Tang, Christian Weiland, and Claas Wenzlik. The GRPI model - an approach for team development. Systemic Excellence Group, 2013.
Rodman, Allison. “Learning Together, Learning on Their Own.” Educational Leadership 76.3 (2018): 12-18.
Son, Lisa K., Nicole Brittingham Furlonge, and Pooja K. Agarwal. Metacognition: How to Improve Students’ Reflections on Learning. Retrieval Practice, 2020.
TNTP. The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development. Brooklyn, NY: TNTP, 2015.
Tooley, Melissa and Kaylan Connally. No Panacea: Diagnosing What Ails Teacher Professional Development Before Reaching for Remedies. New America, 2016. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED570895
Toshalis, Eric and Michael J. Nakkula. Motivation, Engagement, and Student Voice. Boston, MA: Jobs for the Future, 2012.
Trotter, Yvonne D. “Adult Learning Theories: Impacting Professional Development Programs.” The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: 8-13.
Verschelden, Cia.Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2017.
How Can Schools Strengthen Teacher Belonging?
The following essay was written in the fall of 2020 in tandem with ORLA-5052 - How People Learn: Implications for Educational Leadership, a core course in the Klingenstein Center's Ed.M. program.
I. Introduction: A Sense of Belonging
Humans are fundamentally motivated to seek out a sense of belonging (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), which Walton and Brady (2017) define as the “feeling of being accepted, included, respected in, and contributing to a setting.” While relationships can be an important source of this feeling, it’s worth noting that a sense of belonging (or lack thereof) is highly subject to contextual cues from the surrounding environment, which signal whether or not a particular person “belongs” in a given space. When it comes to student learning, researchers and educators have demonstrated the ways in which this sense of belonging is critical to cultivating the motivation to learn. Allensworth et al. (2018) include “I belong in this learning community” as one of their four mindsets that are particularly important for the learning process, while Verschelden (2017) states that “a sense of belonging seems to be fundamental, an essential element of the learning environment upon which all others are predicated.” Conversely, an absence of belonging can have the opposite effect, whereby ongoing questions about the status of one’s place in a learning community chews up cognitive bandwidth that could otherwise be devoted to the learning process.
In order to address concerns around student belonging, researchers and educators have identified a range of different interventions, including the implementation of peer mentoring programs (Verschelden, 2017), increasing the range of visible representation to include socially marginalized identities (Walton and Brady, 2017), and developing a critical mass of socially marginalized populations amongst both students and faculty (Verschelden, 2017). This is all well and good, yet such suggestions overlook the importance of teacher belonging and the role it plays in the successful realization of such interventions. Much like our students, teachers also experience and grapple with questions about belonging, which can heavily influence their success when it comes to the classroom (and their staying power within it). Kaiser (2011) notes how 10% of public school educators in the United States leave the profession after one year, followed by an additional 12% after the second year. Moreover, Haynes (2014) found that 40 to 50% of new teachers leave education after just five years in the profession. While there are a range of factors that contribute to this high rate of turnover, researchers have demonstrated the link between teacher departures and a low sense of belonging (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2011). This echoes the above findings about the relationship between belonging and learning: if people experience higher degrees of intrinsic motivation when belonging has been addressed, it would follow that a lack of belonging would lead to lower levels of motivation and, in the case of educators, disengagement from the profession. If our teachers do not feel accepted and valued within their learning communities, then asking teachers to design for student belonging will be met with limited success. Put another way, any effort to improve a sense of student belonging must begin with an effort to improve teacher belonging. How, then, can we do so?
The literature addressing the role of teacher belonging is growing, though the topic remains underexplored. In the essay that follows, I plan to draw from some of this research when considering how schools might address concerns about teacher belonging, though I also plan to supplement this work with the relatively more expansive findings regarding students and consider the extent to which similar interventions could prove relevant to teachers. Specifically, by intentionally designing for teacher connectivity, embedding professional development, providing mentor opportunities for early-career teachers, providing additional supports to mid-career teachers, and hiring for critical mass, schools can increase the sense of teacher belonging, in turn freeing up the cognitive resources of their educators to design for student belonging more effectively.
II. Design for Teacher Connectivity
When it comes to a sense of belonging, moments of connectivity can play a critical role. Walton and Brady (2017) state that “small cues of similarity or connectedness can open the door to a potential relationship,” while Culture Amp (2017) notes that “proximity and personal interactions contribute greatly to creating social bonds.” Teachers are no exception. O’Brennan et al. (2017) found that staff members who reported higher rates of connectivity to their schools, students, and colleagues reported both higher rates of belonging and lower levels of burnout. And yet, the traditional structure of schools often serves as a barrier to facilitating this sort of connectivity amongst teachers in ways that are different from students. Indeed, students have the benefit of being in classrooms with their peers, which means connectivity can be fostered through thoughtful design on the part of the instructor. The same, however, cannot be said for teachers, who are often the only adult in their classroom. The result is what Barth (2006) refers to as “parallel play,” whereby teachers engage in similar work in relative isolation from one another. We cannot design for connectivity if there is no one to connect to.
Of course, one solution to this problem would be to reorganize schools in such a way that educators are no longer teaching in isolation from one another but instead working in teams, ideally in the same classroom. Such a shift, however, is likely outside the scope of most institutions, which means smaller efforts are likely more attainable. Barth (2006) highlights how a culture of peer classroom observations can be efficacious at breaking down the parallel play model, noting how school leaders can work to incentivize this work by modeling it themselves (i.e. having other administers observe them) or by providing class coverage to free up teacher time. Point being, the more opportunities there are for teachers to connect, the more opportunities there will be for teachers to develop a sense of belonging.
III. Embed Professional Development
The above points about designing for teacher connectivity largely relate to the collegial culture of a particular school, which is closely related to the relationships between educators. Faculty collaboration, however, is not restricted to collegiality. One of the most common places in which teacher collaboration occurs is within professional development, though the effectiveness of such efforts varies wildly when it comes to teacher belonging. Indeed, a sense of belonging is unlikely to stem from the single-day workshop, which does little to sustain relationships over time. On the other hand, embedding teacher development into the fabric school, perhaps by setting aside protected time for groups of teachers to meet regularly - something recommended by Allensworth et al. (2018) - strikes me as a more promising pathway toward both increased levels of belonging and enduring learning on the part of teachers. O’Brennan et al. (2017) came to similar conclusions in their research about teacher belonging, noting how such efforts are particularly needed “at the secondary level, where staff may not feel as strong a sense of belonging because of the existence of multiple subsystems within the school.”
IV. Leverage Mentoring Programs for Early-Career Teachers...
Early-career teachers that report a low sense of belonging are more likely to experience burnout and, in turn, more likely to leave the profession. The parallel here with student retention is well documented, in that students who experience a lack of belonging are more likely to drop-out of their academic program (Verschelden, 2017). This is particularly true for students of socially marginalized identities, who enter academic environments with higher degrees of ambiguity about whether or not they belong in said spaces. The collective burden of this uncertainty means that the most marginalized of our students are often spending more time worrying about their place in a school (among myriad other factors) and less time engaging in learning, resulting in a cognitive depletion that easily translates into poor academic marks and lower retention rates.
Research suggests that something similar may be at work with early career teachers (O’Brennan et al., 2017), who are likely to experience high degrees of conscious incompetence. Rather than attribute these challenges to the difficulties of a demanding profession, it’s quite possible that new teachers instead interpret struggle as a sign that they do not belong and, consequently, leave. In order to disrupt this process, it can be helpful for us to return to the above examples about students. Specifically, if schools can find a way to reduce the ambiguity around belonging, then students will have more cognitive resources available to focus on learning. Verschelden (2017) points to the ways in which story-sharing can be an effective way to do just that. When new students of socially marginalized identities have an opportunity to hear people like them speak to past struggles, struggle is then normalized as part of the learning process, thus interrupting the attribution of struggle to identity. Could the same be true of teachers?
Mentoring programs for new or early career teachers seem promising in this regard, particularly if such programs allow mentors to share and normalize their early-career struggles, thus minimizing the chance that new teachers will attribute struggle to a lack of belonging. Verschelden (2017) notes how “one of the strongest assets of a peer adviser...is that he has, very recently, been in the shoes of a first-year student,” which suggests that a similar program for teachers may want to focus on recruiting mentors whose early career experience is more proximate (unlike late career teachers, who are further removed from the lived experience of early career teaching). Again, to quote Verschelden (2017): “The positive effect on bandwidth of trusting that someone is watching out for you and that you will get a notice if you are about to head down a side path is incalculable.”
V. ...But Don’t Forget About Mid-Career Teachers, Either
While mentoring programs can be effective ways to assuage concerns about belonging for early-career teachers, O’Brennan et al. (2017) found that mid-career teachers experience higher levels of burnout, which comes in tandem with fewer support opportunities for educators who may have higher workloads. It’s possible that consistent implementation of mentoring programs over time will yield a “trickle-down effect” akin to what Verschelden found regarding belonging interventions for students early in their career. Like those students who experienced the positive effects later in their academic careers, mid-career teachers who experienced a mentoring program early in their career may experience less burnout later on.
That said, schools should pay attention to “burnout creep,” which may have a negative impact on teacher belonging (and, in turn, student belonging). O’Brennan et al. (2017) recommend that schools consider implementing various levels of additional support for mid-career teachers, such as a coaching model, which may also provide educators with additional opportunities to connect with each other (assuming, of course, there is also an offset in workload to account for the added responsibility).
VI. Hire for Critical Mass
One of the most powerful ways an institution can address concerns about belonging is to develop what Steele refers to as a “critical mass” of the socially marginalized population. According to Steele (2010), this concept “refers to the point at which there are enough minorities in a setting...that individual minorities no longer feel uncomfortable there because they are minorities - in our terms, they no longer feel an interfering level of identity threat.” And yet, Walton and Brady (2017) note how there is a lack of clarity regarding the so-called “tipping point” at which critical mass assuages concerns about belonging, particularly when one considers the vast diversity of educational contexts. What constitutes a critical mass tipping point in a rural community may be quite different from a school located in an urban environment.
Interestingly enough, O’Brennan et al. (2017) found that urbanicity was not significantly related to teacher burnout and - by extension - lower rates of teacher belonging. This may be due to the fact that urban environments are, by and large, more diverse than their rural counterparts, which may necessitate a “lower” tipping point for critical mass within educational contexts, as faculty have great access to a wider range of communities. Speaking to my own experience as a male educator that identifies as LGBTQ, I am far less likely to encounter a “critical mass” of LGBTQ individuals in rural environments, which means that schools in such settings may have to work harder to diversify their hiring efforts in order to reach a critical mass and, in turn, assuage concerns about belonging for LGBTQ faculty. Schools in urban settings, however, may not face the same challenge, as cities tend to have higher LGBTQ populations (I would imagine this also holds true for race, where urban populations tend to be more racially diverse and can thus offer access to community in ways that suburban and rural communities cannot). The point is that, while critical mass is deeply important for belonging, the context of a given school will heavily shape the ways in which a given school must cultivate it.
VII. Conclusion
The above solutions are not intended to be a panacea so much as a starting point. While much of our focus is rightfully on the student experience and questions about student belonging, we sometimes lose track of teachers in the process. And yet, this oversight can often prove critical. To quote Barth (2006), “The nature of relationships among the adults within a school has a greater influence on the character and quality of that school and on student accomplishment than anything else.” If a learning community consists of adults who don’t feel as though they belong, it’s hard to imagine how students will.
Bibliography
Allensworth, E. M., Farrington, C. A., Gordon, M. F., Johnson, D. W., Klein, K., McDaniel, B., & Nagoaka, J. (2018). Supporting Social, Emotional, & Academic Development: Research Implications for Educators. University of Chicago Consortium on School Research
Barth, R. S. (2006). Improving relationships within the schoolhouse. Educational Leadership, 63(6), 8-13.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin,117, 497-529.
Culture Amp. (2017). 6 Ways to foster belonging in the workplace.
Haynes, M. (2014). On the path to equity: Improving the effectiveness of beginning teachers. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.
Kaiser, A. (2011). Beginning teacher attrition and mobility: Results from the first through third waves of the 2007–08 beginning teacher longitudinal study (NCES 2011-318). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.
O’Brennan, L., Pas, E., & Bradshaw, C. (2017). Multilevel examination of burnout among high school staff: Importance of staff and school factors. School Psychology Review, 46(2), 165-176.
Skaalvik, E. M., & Skaalvik, S. (2011). Teacher job satisfaction and motivation to leave the teaching profession: Relations with school context, feeling of belonging, and emotional exhaustion. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27, 1029–1038.
Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. W.W. Norton and Company.
Verschelden, C. (2017). Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization. Stylus.
Walton, G. M. and Brady, S. T. (2017). The Many Questions of Belonging. Handbook of Competence and Motivation: Theory and Application. Eds. Andrew J. Elliot, Carol S. Dweck, and David S. Yeager. The Guilford Press.
Ethics of Care: An Attempt to Solve Ethics’ Patriarchal Problem
The following essay was written in the fall of 2020 in tandem with A&HF-4192 - Ethics and Education, a core course in the Klingenstein Center's Ed.M. program.
Succinctly put, care ethics situates relationships at the heart of the moral enterprise. By attending to those for whom we take responsibility, the “ones caring” aim to preserve caring relationships as both means and end. This perspective stems from an understanding of human beings as fundamentally relational in nature. As infants, humans enter the world deeply dependent on their care-givers for survival, while the elderly often leave this world in a similar manner. Conversely, others depend on us for care in return at various points in our lives, resulting in an interplay between caring for and being cared for that forms the basis for all human action.
When it comes to the strengths of care ethics, one must understand a little bit more about the border context to which it is responding. For much of its history, philosophy and ethics have been the purview of white men in predominantly western European countries, which means that many of the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions that inform normative ethical theories are the byproduct of a fairly narrow perspective. Indeed, one such assumption is that human beings are primarily individual agents predominantly motivated by rationality, and that one can utilize reason to determine what is or is not in one’s best interest. Not surprisingly, some of the major proponents of these theories also suggested that women were less capable of fulfilling these ethics ideals than men. Citing the work of Anette Baier, Virginia Held highlights “Kant’s claim that women are incapable of being fully moral because of their reliance on emotion rather than reason” (Held, 11), while Aristotle’s understanding of women as naturally inferior is, by now, well known. Consider the following passage from his work, The History of the Animals: “woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike...more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive” (Aristotle, Book IX). The ethics of care challenges these assumptions, arguing that “moral inquiries that rely entirely on reason and rationalistic deductions or calculations are seen as deficient” (Held, 10). Instead, ethics of care seeks to restore and center the role of emotion (and, by extension, the feminine experience), long marginalized from ethical discourse, resulting in what I might characterize as a more complete consideration of human experience. This completeness is one of care ethics’ major strengths.
Indeed, we can extend this point about completeness beyond its inclusion of emotion in moral behavior to the ways in which care ethics is far more sensitive to context. Unlike other ethical theories that deal in the world of abstract ideals, Nel Noddings notes how “our real moral problems do not appear clearly constrained and decked out like so many textbook problems in algebra” (Noddings, 105). Rather, our worlds are deeply inflected by the emotions and responsibilities that spring from our relationships with others. Again, Held notes the ways in which previous ethical theories advocated “impartial calculations to determine what will produce the most happiness for the most people have been developed for interactions between relative strangers” (Held, 24; emphasis mine). Yet, most of our interactions will occur in caring relations - relations with family, friends, and loved ones. By accounting for the sense of responsibility that stems from our engagement with caring relations, care ethics is more likely to speak to our lived experiences in ways that utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics do not.
That said, care ethics is not without its limitations. First, despite its attempt to push back against the longstanding history of patriarchal bias in ethical theory, care ethics does not challenge the foundational assumption that gender roles can be dichotomized into rational (masculine) and emotional (feminine) dimensions. This may be due to Noddings’ own assumption that differences between men and women in their capacity to care are biological in nature, rather than sociocultural, in turn offering context for her assertion that “females have easier and more direct access to caring” than men (Noddings, 129). This is not to deny the history of “men intellectualiz[ing], abstract[ing], and institutionaliz[ing] that which women treat directly and concretely” (Noddings, 130) so much as to raise the question of whether such action is the consequence of sociocultural conditioning, rather than biological predisposition. The fact that Noddings stakes her claim on the latter exposes the limitations of care ethics, particularly with respect to LGBTQ individuals, whose lived experiences challenge many facets of Noddings framework. Indeed, Noddings conception of care in parenting remains deeply heterosexual, arguing for a sort of dual role “in which fathers might have contributed more directly to parenting simply by understanding, appreciated, and feeling with their wives” (Noddings, 129). Each of these statements suggests that Noddings is less concerned with challenging gendered roles so much as tilting the scales in the other direction, which comes at the exclusion of many individuals whose experiences fall outside of this binary. Are gay male parents less capable of caring for children due their identities as men? What about transgender women? Held acknowledges these limitations of care ethics when noting that “other feminist critics find women’s experience of mothering as it has occurred under patriarchal conditions suspect” (Held, 22), though also suggests that care ethics has evolved beyond its original limitations. That said, the question remains about the extent to which care ethics is an example of what Audre Lorde refers to as using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.
This brings me to a second weakness of care ethics, which lies in its tenuous relationship to an ethic of justice. Both Noddings and Held are aware of this concern and attempt to address it in different ways and with varying degrees of success. Noddings offers up the example of Ms. A, who struggles to respond to her Aunt Phoebe’s overt racism. For Noddings, Ms. A ultimately “would stand beside...Aunt Phoebe” (Noddings, 110), where such an action “is a manifestation of trust, and that trust is grounded in relation” (Noddings, 112). While I agree with Noddings’ suggestion that caring relationships do often take primacy when it comes to moral decision making (particularly when various values, such as defending loved ones or standing up to racism, are in tension), I find her statement that “we cannot love everyone” (Noddings, 112) to ring deeply hollow. Indeed, such an assertion seems little more than a weak excuse that allows both Ms. A and Aunt Phoebe to ignore the ways in which their actions maintain a structure of oppression and consequently avoid responsibility for it. That said, I might also challenge Noddings’ suggestion that Ms. A’s complicitness is, in fact, an act of caring for her Aunt Phoebe. By allowing her racism to flow unchecked, Ms. A is also allowing her Aunt Phoebe to perpetuate violence against oppressed peoples. Wouldn’t a more caring response be one in which Ms. A draws upon her previously established relationship with Aunt Phoebe to take responsibility for her actions? It is here that I think Held’s solution proves more convincing, as she writes that “There can be no justice without care...for without care no child would survive and there would be no persons to respect” (Held, 17). Perhaps care can point the way toward rectifying injustices, as we draw upon the strength of our relations to engage in that work.
Despite these shortcomings, care ethics’ emphasis on caring relations as the locus of moral action points toward some promising (and urgent) reforms in education today. Prioritizing care would challenge some of our basic assumptions about how schools should operate, particularly with respect to compliance. Indeed, Noddings notes how these two approaches are fundamentally at odds with another, writing that “the frequent insistence on obedience to rules and adherence to ritual contributes to the erosion of genuine caring” (Noddings, 117). Such compliance-based education is also closely related to disciplinary systems that disproportionately punish students of color, which suggests that implementation of care ethics has the capacity to foster more equitable, inclusive learning environments for our students. Finally, care ethics can also be a vehicle to address a longstanding tension that I have felt in my role as an educator, which is my dual role as care-giver and an evaluator. Noddings notes the ways in which these two roles work against each other, which leads her to state that “grading...should not be done by teachers. If it must be done, it should be done by external examiners” (Noddings, 195). I may not go quite so far, but I do think a care-centered approach can yield much needed reform efforts on the ways in which teachers evaluate the learning of their students. Indeed, most teachers will probably tell you that it’s the relationships with students that mean the most in their work. Perhaps it makes sense to adopt an ethical framework that also takes such a claim seriously.