dissertation proposal by temi rose 2/20/02
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM STATEMENT
A National Perspective
Art in Academia: Valuing Aesthetic Cognition
Technology in Education: Ethical Considerations
Art and ritual.
Learning, Change and Democracy
Rationale for this Study
CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW
Introduction: Weaving a Web
Art in Schools: Theory
Justice, Responsibility and Care
Conversational Reality
Motivation and Learning
Adult Education
Action Research: Methodology and Principles
Art in Schools: Practice
Technology in Schools
Conclusion: Seeking an Articulation
CHAPTER III: METHOD
The Site
The Participants
Data Sources
Procedure
Researcher's Role
Data Analysis
APPENDIX I - THE STATE GUIDELINES FOR TECHNOLOGICAL
EDUCATION
APPENDIX II - THE STATE GUIDELINES FOR ART EDUCATION
APPENDIX III – LETTER FROM RESEARCHER TO THE CAMPUS
LEADERSHIP COMMITTEE
APPENDIX IV– FROM THE FINE ARTS ACADEMY COORDINATOR:
E-MAIL INITIATING CONTACT WITH RESEARCH COMMUNITY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JUSTICE, RESPONSIBILITY AND CARE
Carol Gilligan’s work changed my life. In a Different Voice (1993), and
Meeting at the Crossroads (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), articulated and delineated
a critical difference between the way men and women use language and the way
that men and women understand justice, responsibility, and care. For me, as
a young woman, Gilligan's articulation helped me to have confidence in my own
tendency to value care, even while historical exigencies found me seeking social
justice.
Moral Orientations
Gilligan’s premise was that men tend to work with generalized principles
while women think and attempt to act in response to particular situations. Many
objections have been raised against Gilligan’s assertion that gender is
the primary reason for the difference in moral orientation (Benhabib, 1987).
Rarely, however, have I read any objection to Gilligan’s assertion that
there are two moral orientations. Researchers arguing against Gilligan’s
gender orientation have suggested that the generalized perspective is practiced
primarily in the public sphere while the focus on the particular is appropriate
in the realm of the personal. Feminists have responded that relegating women
and women’s perspectives and values to the private sphere is an artifice
of patriarchal practice (Ibid.).
Meeting at the Crossroads (Brown & Gilligan, 1992) described how a group of female researchers, in the process of studying young girls’ transition into adolescence, were forced to change their research methodology and the way they used language in order to communicate respectfully with their research participants. The researchers found that speaking respectfully and intimately to participants elicited the type of self-revealing anecdotes that the researchers were hoping to use for data. The lessons I learned from this book affected all my teaching activities and much of my personal and creative life. The assertion made was that professional language can mask as well as reveal, that people asking questions or in any role of authority or power could chase away the very knowledge they were seeking simply by speaking in a manner that was associated with power and authority. This assertion still fascinates me. What is it about power and authority that silences? How can we speak intelligently without alienating those to whom we wish to speak?
Meeting at the Crossroads also examined the way young girls make choices to
silence themselves; how girls take on specific cultural roles and along with
those roles, a manner of speaking and relating. All of this seemed very familiar
to my experience growing up. Some of the times I had felt most lost and betrayed
by my friends were apparently when they were assuming a feminine role that required
a denial of the kind of harsh truth I was accustomed to speaking and living.
After I read Meeting at the Crossroads, I read In a Different Voice (1993).
In a Different Voice described Gilligan’s theory of moral orientation.
This book helped me to maintain a sense of inner coherence as I worked through
issues in my marriages and in my working life. The issues I am referring to
have to do with what I had learned about myself by reading Meeting at the Crossroads.
I had learned that I needed to speak as close to my personal truth as I possibly
could; this would aid me in becoming what I had always wanted to be: my true
self. It seemed to me an obvious corollary to Gilligan’s approach, that
the coherence of my personality was dependent upon the way I used language.
The reason I needed to stay in touch with my true self, was that I wanted to
be an artist and my understanding of the artistic process was that it involved
the artist as a filter. The clearer the filter, the greater the art. The way
to make the filter clear was to be as honest as possible; something that was
clearly much more difficult linguistically for women to achieve than for men.
The next subsection in this section on justice, responsibility and care, will consider the work of two educational theorists, Nel Noddings and Lisa Goldstein, who have contributed to our understanding of the ethic of care as applied in educational environments.
Care in Particular
Women’s sensitivity to particulars, whether socially conditioned or biologically
determined, nevertheless affects how we handle social reality and political
and moral choice. Nel Noddings is the theorist who first brought the ethic of
care into educational literature (Noddings, 1981; Raywid, 1981). The ethic of
care is a principle that educators may choose to assume whereby they take responsibility
for their share of the affect in an educational situation. The ethic of care,
Noddings was careful to point out, does not require educators to love in the
same way as they would in the privacy of their personal life. But the ethic
of care does require the educator to accept an interpersonal responsibility
for feeling states that is co-created in educational situations.
Noddings’ concept of interpersonal responsibility is closely examined and further illuminated by Lisa Goldstein in her book, Teaching with Love (1997). In Goldstein’s study the ethic of care, as practiced in a specific early education classroom, was revealed to consist of complex, non-trivial, and anything-but-stereotypical encounters and attitudes. One of Goldstein’s points was that, because care is, by definition, something that occurs between real people in real time, it will always be unique. Each participant, each researcher, each reader, must take the responsibility to consider her own values and represent them with consideration and respect for others. Every practical example of the ethic of care, if it is genuine, will be unique and may cause participants and observers to question their values. This is not to be seen as a compromise of the validity of the ethic or of the research but rather is the proof of its living nature, of its embeddedness in a relational architecture of experience. This type of reasoning has furthered Dewey’s constructs concerning experience and education, to include the affective and (more traditionally considered) personal as factors worthy of consideration, study, and analysis.
The ethic of care does not have to be seen as in opposition to a principle-based ethic. To dichotomize the specific and the general and to separate personal (private) experience from shared (political, social) experience is unjustified because in lived experience they are part of a continuum. Rather, I prefer to understand the practice of a situation-based ethic of care in education as an addition to, or an extension of, adherence to principle-based rules, generalized guidelines, and state and federal laws. An ethic of care takes as fact that the emotive content, and the affective context of conversations will always affect not only the interpretation of events but the substance of their occurrence. An ethic of care is in no way inimical to rule-based justice and it is a mistake to see it as such. Care and justice occur on a continuum of moral understanding. The sort of continuum that contains and connects seeming oppositions will be further explored later in this chapter, in the discussion of the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur.
In her book, Maternal Thinking (1989), Sarah Ruddick shared a philosophical perspective on the ethic of care. Ruddick interpreted the ethic of care as a form of justice and moral responsibility that comes about through the practice of mothering. In Ruddick’s view, mothering is a labor, a praxis, and generates, as all praxis does, a language and value system particular to its practical exigencies. Ruddick extended the theory of moral responsibility and the ethic of care by showing how the practice of mothering can be generalized to principles that can be understood as fundamental to a Gandhian philosophy of peace action. In other words, Ruddick extended further the concept of the ethic of care by bringing it closer into the rule-based, generalized, public arenas of international relations, and political, peace activism.
Summary: The Ethic of Care
Ruddick (1989) contended that the process of nurturing other provided the ground
for an epistemology of non-violent, active participation in social relationships.
Ruddick’s purpose was to delineate a nurturant moral orientation that has
as its basic value the creation of safety and decency for people. Noddings (1981)
contended that educators have a moral responsibility to engage in a dialogic
relationship with their students that conveys care. Noddings asserted that a
respect for individuality in the abstract requires teachers to model that respect
by assuming an interpersonal, conversational, and relational stance of care
for their students as particular individuals. Goldstein (1997) illustrated the
specific methodologies that she and the teacher she observed used to self-reflectively
manifest the ethic of care in a unique educational situation. These studies
and analyses built on the studies and theoretical perspectives initiated by
Carol Gilligan (1982, 1987, 1988; Brown & Gilligan, 1992)). Gilligan worked
with the premise that language and conversation are not only a form of data
available to researchers interested in understanding social realities, but also
a form of agentic action that can be used to affect social reality.
The following section begins a new thread: conversational reality theory. We have previously explored art education theory as supportive of cognitive pluralism. We have discussed conversation and care used as extensions of the ethical imperative of democratic process operating in educational situations. In the next section we will expand our understanding of conversation and relationship, and briefly examine the roles they play in re-creating and sustaining culture. next