Another Look at a Feminist Ethics of Teaching

Another Look At a Feminist Ethics of Teaching Donna Engelmann, Alverno College, From Care Ethics to an Ethics of Milwaukee, WI., teaches and conducts Teaching research in the areas of political and social For nearly twenty years I have been a philosophy, ethics, feminist theory and teacher of philosophy in a liberal arts college pedagogy. She has consulted and presented for women. Ours is not an elite institution, but workshops on teaching, assessment and one whose mission is to educate women who institutional change with faculty and might not otherwise consider a college administrators in colleges and universities in education - women of color, first and second the United States, Canada and Great Britain. generation immigrant women, women from working class and poor families. We have our Abstract share of high school valedictorians, but we By drawing on feminist epistemology, ethics also have many students burdened by and pedagogy this paper articulates some deficient educational backgrounds. Whatever aspects of a care-based ethics of teaching. their learning needs, my colleagues and I try Understanding teaching as a species of to hold our students to high expectations, and caring, it explores some consequences for to provide the support they require to achieve teaching practice of the attentiveness, them. Many influences have shaped my responsiveness, and responsibility choices about how to relate to these students characteristic of caring professionals. and how to teach them; one of the most Résumé important is my reading of feminist En tirant de l’épistémologie féministe de philosophy. l’éthique et de la pédagogie, cet article I believe that a feminist ethics of care exprime clairement certains aspects de provides the best foundation for an ethics of l’enseignement de l’éthique basée sur les teaching, and in this article I want to explain soins. En comprenant que l’enseignement est how feminist ethics and epistemology, une espèce de soin, il explore certaines des feminist pedagogy, and my practice with my conséquences de la pratique de students have informed my view of what and l’enseignement du soin apporté au travail, de how I ought to teach. In thinking about the la réceptivité et de la responsabilité domains of teacher responsibility, I will draw caractéristique des profesionnels qui ont de la on the work of Joan Tronto on professional compassion. responsibility, and in considering the implications this has for pedagogy, I will turn to the work of Goldberger et al. in their 1996 volume, Knowledge, Difference and Power: Essays Inspired by Women's Ways of Knowing. Given some well-founded suspicion of a feminist ethics of care, it is with some trepidation that I propose an ethics of teaching situated within that tradition. Varieties of an ethics of care were developed by a number of feminist philosophers, among them Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Joan 62 Atlantis 33.2, 2009 www.msvu.ca/atlantis Tronto; and some of the sharpest criticisms of Tronto defines caring about as being this approach have come from feminists attentive to others' need for care, caring for as themselves (Cole and Coultrap-Quinn 1992; taking on the responsibility of responding to Gilligan 1972; Kittay and Meyers 1987; that need, care giving as the response itself, Noddings 1984; Ruddick 1989; Tronto 1993). and receiving care as openness in one's need In most general terms, an ethics of care to the assistance of others. Tronto's account focuses on care as a central moral category, is helpful because she reminds us that care and suggests that a coherent focus of an giving is more than an intuitive and untrained ethical theory can be attention to how we response; it requires competence and might best care for one another in concrete reflective practice. At the same time, situations. Feminist critiques of ethics of care professional competence is incomplete objected to the essentialist claims in early without the attentiveness, responsiveness, formulations about the moral reasoning of all and responsibility called for in a caring women, to what seemed like the valorization relationship. of specifically feminine virtues, and to the In an article entitled "Does Managing somewhat simplistic opposition between the Professionals Affect Professional Ethics?" ethics of care and the ethics of justice. As a (2001) Tronto wrote about the increasing result of two decades of critiques of care tendency for managers to "survey and control" ethics, some refinements of this approach the activities of professionals, in ways that have been articulated, so that in proposing an appear to compromise the professionals' ethics of care for teaching, I can say what I do autonomy. While Tronto does not have much not mean: such an ethics of care would not to say about college and university faculty in require accepting the existence of or this article, complaints by faculty about the advocating the adoption of "feminine virtues"; growing intrusion of administrators into how it would not rest on universal claims about and what they teach are increasingly heard in how all women think or reason morally; it academic circles. Tronto acknowledges that would not take mothering, especially professionals have based their claims to mothering in patriarchal cultures, as the autonomy on their professional expertise and paradigm of ethical behavior (in such a way competence, but she says these claims that good mothering is tied to either servility or sometimes take the exaggerated form of supererogation); and it does not propose an insistence on immunity from scrutiny by the ethics of care as exclusive of and superior to institutions and publics they serve. Tronto other ethical approaches, such as an ethic of calls for a reconsideration of the justice. What care ethics does offer, as does responsibilities of professionals by adding the its "cousin," virtue ethics, is the emphasis on requirement of caring to the possession of the ethical requirements that arise out of expert knowledge and the provision of practices in particular circumstances or competent service. Echoing Tronto, in what domains. follows, I will explore what adding caring to Some early writers in the care competence in the act of teaching might look tradition suggested that an ethics of care like. ought to be restricted to the private sphere, leaving the sphere of politics and public life to Framework for an Ethics of Teaching: be governed by justice, with its emphasis on Attentiveness, Responsiveness, duty, obligation and rights. Instead, following Responsibility Joan Tronto, I suggest that the four If as competent teaching components of caring - caring about, caring professionals we are called to take up the for, care giving and care receiving - can help responsibility for being attentive and to illuminate the responsibilities of responsive to our students, and our students professionals (Tronto 2001). were women, would we teach in different ways to meet their needs, as many in the www.msvu.ca/atlantis Atlantis 33.2, 2009 63 tradition of feminist pedagogy have stand makes a difference to what we know, suggested? In 1986, in Women's Ways of then it is not irrelevant to women's knowing Knowing, Belenky et al. argued that traditional that women in our society still do the majority courses in higher education were not of domestic labor and have the dominant designed with female students and their responsibility for child-rearing and the care of learning in mind, but foregrounded the the dependent, and that many occupations teacher's knowledge, and focused on and professional fields are still gendered, in questions and issues central to academic and that their practitioners are more likely to be professional disciplines. But questions that one gender than another. Because of women students may have, because they women's social position, women's knowledge arise out of women's experience, may not is often characterized by attention to particular intersect with the questions in the mainstream relationships, objects and persons; it avoids of the discipline as the teacher presents it the separation of the emotions and bodily (Belenky et al. 1986). Effective learning experience from knowledge; and it includes experiences for women would build on what the capacity to appreciate as well as to women know and how they acquire criticize (Ruddick 1996). Recognizing that this knowledge. Effective and caring teaching is the kind of knowing that women may bring would thus not be focused on the teacher and to the classroom, what does being attentive to what she knows, but centered on the student and responding to women's learning needs and her learning. require? In a collection of essays reflecting on the impact of Women's Ways of Knowing ten Frame Within the Frame: Attentiveness years after its original publication, feminist and Responsiveness in Teaching scholars argued that the revolution in Practice pedagogy and curriculum design called for in Over the last several decades, an that work has remained incomplete. Several attentive and responsive feminist teaching of the authors raised concerns about the idea practice has developed based upon that women know and learn differently that assumptions about these processes of are similar to concerns that have been women's identity formation and knowing. As expressed about the ethics of care. Claims part of an ethnographic study of feminist about a distinctive way of knowing for women, teachers in women's studies programs and if not framed carefully, may appear elsewhere in higher education,

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