Part 2

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Wednesday, October 1. 2008

Students, Teachers and Objectification

[Cross-posted at Leader-Talk.]

This is an extension of some thinking I was doing in this entry -- Citizenship, Workforce and the Ethic of Care.

Nel Noddings writes a great deal about the ethic of care -- the idea that our relationships with students should be grounded in "receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness" -- and her work has been important to me in thinking about my relationship with students and in the way we try to craft relationships at SLA.

The sad thing, of course, is that there are many, many caring adults in schools, yet students do not feel cared for. We have to ask ourselves why this is... the vast majority of teachers went into teaching because they care about kids, because they want to be positive influences in the lives of children, and yet -- especially in our high schools -- it doesn't seem to happen. And, of course, for many of our at risk students, when they don't feel cared for, they drop out.

So what causes the disconnect? Why do adults care and yet students don't feel cared for?

That question begs us to examine the structures and systems -- both philosophical and procedural -- that make up our schools and are, seemingly, getting in the way of caring relationships between students and teachers.

So then, some thoughts...

• School Level: We need to create space for adults and students to come together around their shared humanity, not around a subject to be taught. For us, that's Advisory, but that can take many forms. Noddings suggests the idea that students and teachers could take meals together, for example. Just that one change could create upheaval in the way many traditional schools look at their structures.


• Societal Level: We need to create policies that encourage teachers and students to look at each other with humanity -- and that means finding ways to look at all of a students' work, not just a test score. Again, this could look at a school accreditation program similar to Middle States where the entire school is assessed.


• Semantic Level: We need to stop talking about what schools "create," schools don't create the "21st Century Workforce." Doing that encourages us to think about our students as objects -- that education is something that is done to them. We need to change our language so that even the very way we talk about education breaks down that barrier between school and student... between subject and object.

I really think this is one of the major problems we have in schools today -- they don't feel like very caring institutions, and that needs to change at a very foundational level. We need to better leverage the enormous good will that most teachers enter the profession. We need to remember that teachers come into the profession to make children's lives better.

The good news is that despite every structural impediment there is -- and it's damned near complete these days -- students and teachers keep finding ways to connect as real people all over our country. We just need to change the system to make it a little easier, that's all.

Response to not producing tax payers

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Monday, September 22. 2008

Citizenship, the Workforce and the Ethic of Care

I'm re-examining the work of Nel Noddings, so I'm reading The Challenge to Care in Our Schools, so that's what is informing this post. On a personal note, It's exciting to reexamine her work after a few years away from it, especially since her work has been so formative in the way I think about the structure of the relationships at SLA. (There's a few dozen posts worth of work in that last sentence, but anyway...)

Noddings argues that so many students don't think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards -- and I would argue, standardization -- movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological "student" object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the "why" of what we teach is rarely questioned and the "what" is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Noddings writes in detail about the ramifications of that idea, and she puts forth a compelling argument for how we can change our schools to make them more humane places, but that's not what I want to write about today. (And Dan, before you think that Noddings is someone who is arguing for a wishy-washy definition of care, she's not. In fact, I think she's a theorist that if you were to read, you'd love because she's someone who gives powerful language to many of the things you do in your own practice.)

But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that's the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society -- and a market economy -- to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.

Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools -- and the people within it -- are there because they care about them.