Collective obituary for Nel Noddings

Introduction

Liz Jackson

Education University of Hong Kong

Nel Noddings is known around the world for her contributions to philosophy and philosophy of education. Her work on caring and relational ethics broke new ground in a field that otherwise remains largely dominated by men’s voices and experiences. She has inspired scholars and teachers worldwide to prioritize caring over utility and efficiency, happiness rather than suffering, and respectful relationality at home, at school, and in political affairs. As a person, she stands as a role model to people around the world who want applied philosophy to align with their lived experience and who, like my students in Hong Kong, recognise that an education for growth and development is founded at the most basic level in meaningful human connections.

Nel has been a role model for me in these ways and more since I met her when I was a master’s student at the University of Cambridge in 2004. At that time, she was promoting Happiness and Education (2003), a book as powerful in its argumentation as it is engaging to read. Looking back, I feel fortunate to have met her in such a growth stage in my development, learning early on what it means to be a real scholar in the field from one of the best. Since then, I met her a few times at Philosophy of Education Society (PES) conferences. She always impressed me as kind yet tough, critical, and intellectually intimidating, whether standing before a large audience or taking a break with a cup of coffee. As a scholar, I have gained enormously from her body of work, particularly Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (1993), Philosophy of Education (1995), and Happiness and Education, as well as countless articles, book chapters, lectures, and interviews. Her broad reach, rigour, and ability to connect life’s practical matters with scholarship are part of what makes her stand apart from other philosophers of education of the late-twentieth/early-twenty-first centuries.

Many have stories to tell about Nel as a scholar, a colleague, a mentor, a friend, and a uniquely inspiring while truly human person. Remembrances from colleagues and friends who have known her better than I have follow below.

Our lives at Stanford¹

D. C. Phillips

Stanford University

Dear Nel: This is the first time in our long relationship that I have written you a letter, and it is proving to be very difficult. Not counting the many social occasions that, along with Jim and Val, we enjoyed as couples together, you and I have of course interacted professionally face-to-face many hundreds if not thousands of times and have exchanged memoranda and emails about students and courses, and we have given each other feedback on drafts of our research writings in which we have drawn attention to each other’s philosophical foibles and possible deficiencies. It seems to me that I wrote more than you did! (You thanked me, in your great book Caring, for the detailed comments I had provided—but I wonder if you recall that in a later book, the draft of which had become available while I was out of touch overseas, you thanked me for not commenting!) Only good friends can be so forthright.

But now I am struggling—for how can a mere letter capture a stream of wonderful interactions that goes back for well-over three decades? The task is so daunting I think I need to abandon all attempts to produce a coherent piece and settle instead for a series of vignettes—events that are alive in my memory, and which hopefully will relive in yours.

I arrived at Stanford from Australia as an associate professor, at the start of the 1974–1975 academic year, but we did not meet as you recently had graduated with your PhD and had moved on. But over the next year or two your name cropped up from time to time; evidently you had taken courses in the Philosophy Department with Julius Moravcik, who had also served on your dissertation committee. He had so much enjoyed the experience that he willingly served on the committee of one of my first students at Stanford (Glen Harvey). My image of you was shaped less by Julius’s commendatory remarks than by the fact that he was a real ‘character’ whose philosophical acumen sometimes was offset by a proclivity to put forward genuinely bizarre ideas that seem to have come from ‘left field’. I thought there was a fair chance then that you, too, would be—to put it obliquely—something of an ‘outlier’! It turned out, however, that it was the other side of Julius’s nature that was responsible for his high opinion of you.

We must have met at PES conferences, but nothing stands out in my mind until—several years after my arrival at Stanford—the Noddings family moved back to the Stanford area from Chicago (where you had been head of the Dewey School at the University of Chicago). You started to work as a researcher for Pat Suppes, who in addition to his busy life as a professor in three or four Stanford Departments (Philosophy and Education included), had found time to start a computer-based learning company, and I guess it was your expertise as a maths educator rather than your training in philosophy that made you valuable to him. But as luck would have it, our School of Education (SUSE) had needs especially in the curriculum and teacher education areas (I vaguely recall that Elliot Eisner went on sabbatical), and so you started to work part time for us; eventually we had the opportunity—and the good sense—to appoint you full time. Around the mid-1980s the young colleague who worked with me in philosophy of education failed to obtain tenure, and you moved into that billet.

My first impressions of you as a colleague in the late 1970s and early 1980s were that you were an exceptionally experienced math educator who was also an extremely competent analytic philosopher who, like many of us at the time, produced no doubt important but extremely dry (if not completely arid) papers on what then were standard topics in our field—such things as the ‘task’ versus ‘achievement’ senses of ‘teaching’ and ‘educating’, the differences between teaching, educating, and indoctrinating,… Blessedly I have actually forgotten not only the precise topics within this genre that you wrote on, but also the topics that I contributed to! But clearly this commonality in analytic training allowed us to communicate easily, and we also had a bond in our mutual interest in John Dewey. But then…! I watched in awe as you made a quantum leap and produced a series of remarkable books, starting with Caring.

Several instances involving our teaching stand out. A couple of times we jointly ran a seminar series on Dewey for our advanced students, and following what was then still something of a Stanford tradition (now, I think, completely dead) we taught it in the evenings at our own homes. I recall one series of meetings held in your lounge room, with about a dozen students in easy chairs or on pillows beside the fire; typically each session would start with both of us drawing attention to a couple of passages from the first of the assigned passages (from a chapter of Democracy and Education, for example) that we regarded as especially significant, and after we had made some points about these the students would take turns highlighting passages that they wanted to discuss. What struck me forcibly was that the two of us rarely, if ever, had selected the same passages as worthy of note (even from the one chapter). Almost invariably you chose passages that were pedagogically rich, while my focus seemed always to be on passages of philosophical significance or where I felt Dewey’s argument was philosophically dubious in some way. Whatever the excerpt, however, there always was lively discussion. (On several occasions a visiting scholar from overseas attended, and in later years a couple of them told me how memorable those seminars remained for them.)

Then, of course, there was that extraordinary afternoon when you invited our colleague Myra Strober to be a guest lecturer in the first hour of your class, but you also arranged for her to be wearing a pants suit. Then I came for the second hour, but wearing—as you had requested—a simple dress about which I was not to make any remark. (Actually, I wore a plain grey dress, a black polo-neck shirt with a simple gold chain, and black socks and shoes. Rather fetching!) After I had made my presentation and had left, you debriefed the class; no one commented on the fact that Myra had dressed in typical male clothing, but of course everyone noticed my attire. A few students said they had not known that I was Scottish (evidently they thought I must be wearing the Phillips clan kilt!), but most thought I was offering a satirical challenge to you, the feminist, or at least playing an insulting prank. Subsequent discussion opened the issue of why it was acceptable for a member of a less socially-dominant group to ‘dress up’, but not acceptable for a member of the dominant group to ‘dress down’. Myra’s reputation remained unsullied by this event, but it took me several years to live down!

In subsequent years, while remaining close colleagues at Stanford, our professional lives seemed to run in parallel. I became president of the Philosophy of Education Society, and you followed the next year; you served as Interim Dean of SUSE, and several years later I followed suit (but for a shorter period); and we both became members of the United States National Academy of Education—and you performed marvellous service as its president. Sadly, however, neither of us has sold the film rights to any of our books, but personally I still live in hope. I have also thought that it would be a fitting tribute to you if, in a film or TV bio, the role of Nel Noddings was played by Meryl Streep or perhaps Dame Judi Dench. I would be happy if the minor supporting role of D.C. Phillips was played by Dustin Hoffman; and of course the role of the leading man—Jim—would be a suitable challenge for Harrison Ford.

At any rate, thanks for the memories.

Theory in practice: Nel Noddings’ mentorship²

Susan Verducci

San José State University

On my first day of graduate school, I sat scrubbed and shiny in Nel’s office and asked, ‘What courses shall I take?’ Leaning back in her chair, touching her fingertips together as if in prayer, she responded, ‘Well, now, what would you like to take?’ My boat left the dock that day in a moment emblematic of her mentoring and caring. She was there to help me configure my path, but she wasn’t going to do it for me.

Being asked to compose my academic life was new and unnerving. My degrees in art did not prepare me for a full-time life of the mind. I had a lot to learn from Nel, and here are just a few of the most important lessons she taught me.

1. Trust and be patient. That first year, I found myself in a foreign land where people spoke impenetrable ‘philosophy.’ Alone and confused, I longed for the relative clarity of Samuel Becket and Harold Pinter. Instead, I got Husserl, at the decipherable rate of one paragraph per hour. I felt adrift. What I couldn’t see, but gradually began to feel, was that Nel gently held my boat’s rope in her hands. There was usually no tension on that rope, but when the winds of philosophical youth pulled me off course the rope gently became taut and I would begin the slow and painful process of righting myself. She taught me to trust and be patient with the sort of discomfort I was feeling. She gently assured me it was a sign of impending growth, while at the same time she introduced me to Dewey’s notion of disequilibrium. She taught me to trust and be patient with ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion – that they can be part of the process and the product of good work. She also taught me to trust and be patient with myself – that anything worth knowing or doing requires time.

2. Consider everything. An image of her slender finger tracing a crescent-moon accompanies her phrase, ‘Now, now, wait a minute. Let’s look at that more closely.’ It would drive students nuts, wondering why she would stop to consider wrongheaded ideas. It was also maddening that she would rarely commit to taking a position on issues in class. I gradually came to realize that she was indeed taking perhaps the most important stance an academic can – an open one. She was willing to consider and mine even the seemingly outlandish for something of value. Instead of telling us what to think, she painstakingly helped us lay out the best version of our ideas and positions. Her ‘consider everything’ strategy allowed students the space to tease out the salient points to be developed, even if they were in the end not worth developing. Here, the ‘confirmation’ of care theory – attributing the best possible motive and justification to the cared-for – extended not only to me as a student, but also to ideas, books, and arguments. In class, when she was unwilling to use her authority to influence our thinking, she was modelling receptivity, independence, and the care and feeding of ideas.

3. Philosophy and wine can be mutually enhancing. During my years at Stanford, a small cohort of students, professors, and visiting scholars met at her home every week to discuss philosophical readings outside our regular coursework. On these evenings the first order of business was chatting over a glass of wine. We chatted until her husband Jim fled. From my position on her couch, I learned that thinking happens in collaboration, and that the best thinking can come from being challenged. Of course, Denis Phillips, her long-time friend, colleague, and philosophical foil, was at these gatherings and helpful in this lesson. As I watched the two of them disagree together, I learned that thinking not only could be a messy road strewn with tricky turns and sudden obstacles, but also that philosophy, at its best, is something that is developed and tested in collaborative relationship with others. At times, wine lubricates this process and relaxes rigid notions that can inhibit intellectual growth.

4. Work and life are not separate. Nel modelled for me the permeable boundaries between work and personal life. I blush to think how many times she and Jim fed me. Nel introduced me to her children and grandchildren, to her garden, to the Jersey Shore. The nearly seamless way that conversation with her wove the abstractions of philosophy with what is typically considered part of the private domain amazed me. I have memories of grocery shopping while discussing Bernard Williams, and of talking about the best way to grow beets between sessions at a philosophy conference. This permeability is reflected in the content of her philosophical work as well, as it dismantles the psychological and philosophical walls between the public and the private.

Finally, she taught me to attend. One of the most appealing aspects of Nel’s philosophical work and mentoring was that she attended to the real world and real people. Decrying the moral supremacy of principle and false philosophical distinctions between the mind, emotions, and body, she listened to people’s inclinations and disinclinations, attended to their emotional worlds, and made sense of the educational and moral world in a way that allowed its richness, complexity, and ambiguity to be appreciated. In both philosophy and mentoring, she paid receptive attention to the specific reality of others. I never felt like an abstract ‘student’ with Nel, but always ‘Susan.’

As I wind down here, my words seem inadequate to the task set before me and find myself fumbling with language. She anticipated this in Caring:

The cared-for glows, grows stronger, and feels not so much that he has been given something as that something has been added to him. And this ‘something’ may be hard to specify. Indeed, for the one-caring and the cared-for in a relationship of genuine caring, there is no felt need on either part to specify what sort of transformation has taken place.

Well, yes. But this does not anticipate my need to express gratitude for her caring and mentorship. To honour and pay tribute to her ability to live out her philosophical ideas in our relationship is a natural part of what it means to have fully received her acts of care. I am grateful not only for our relationship but also for the opportunity to express the ‘something’ she has added to me.

Between Bertie and Dewey

Lynda Stone

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nel Noddings is known worldwide as a philosopher of education both within communities of the profession and the larger discipline. She once said to me, ‘I want to live long enough to die between Bertie and Dewey,’ two of her favorite philosophers. In August 2022, she got her wish—with a bonus—dying among family in Florida.

For forty years, Nel was my teacher, adviser, colleague, friend, and family member. In the close family I became known as the younger sister, not young enough to be one of her daughters. She was my mentor and always a role model, one I could not hope to emulate. Overall, she was a philosopher, a scholar and teacher, who lived her beliefs, with ideas that developed as uniquely hers.

One way to describe her influence, at least with me, is to name it as a kind of indirect mentoring, never really telling, always raising questions, putting thoughts out to consider. In graduate class, she taught like this. In advising on my dissertation, her critique of writing consisted of a small, neatly written question in a margin: ‘Is this what you mean?’

Over our history, her mentoring continued largely indirectly. We never wrote together; we did not share drafts of papers. I put together conference sessions for her and was occasionally invited to write about her work. I taught Caring often. She did recommend me for opportunities and once I participated in a panel at APA with her and Martha Nussbaum—and there too we wrote individual papers. She talked about me as her student in a video interview still available through Arizona State University.

Primarily across these decades, we conversed with each other on long walks at her beloved home at the Jersey shore. These continued on the second-floor deck with a glass and a snack. We talked about current events and politics and education. She shared her present reading, book lists that I wrote down to order. If she had a concern about something about which I expressed interest, here came the indirect question sending me on a quest. An example was her hesitation about Foucault’s personal ethics. She did acknowledge our conversations in book acknowledgements and dedicated one collection to her ‘students,’ Steve Thornton and me. Her book publications until quite recently, nearly one a year after retirement from Stanford in 1998, were a Christmas present. Once right before COVID, she made a point of asking after a long-awaited book project and posed a now ‘dear’ compliment on my own career.

There are many memories of my life with Nel that I cherish as I hope to write in my own retirement. I should note that in terms of Bertie (Bertrand Russell) and Dewey, Nel died at 93, outliving Dewey by three months!

Nel Noddings’ continuing presence

Barbara Stengel

Vanderbilt University

That Nel Noddings is no longer in the world as we know it, and no longer part of our circle of practicing educator-philosophers, brings me great sorrow. That she was a significant philosophical and personal presence throughout my entire career brings me an equal measure of joy. I am thinking now about her presence, her absence, and the absent presence that I anticipate.

Several decades ago, I invited Nel to participate in an American Educational Research Association session focused on the moral dimensions of teacher education. Our presentation fell late in the day after the shootings at Columbine High School. Columbine had not been mentioned at any of the sessions I had attended earlier. But Nel stood up and said that it was ridiculous to think we could talk about the moral dimensions of teaching and teacher education without facing up to life-changing and life-damaging events occurring in our schools. She proceeded to do just that, weaving her remarks about Columbine around how an ethic of care accompanied by a refocused curriculum that addressed ‘centers of care’ might impact students’ lives for the better. She did not say that educators who understood caring as a relation could have prevented such shootings by present and former students, but she did suggest that an absence of care as a guiding design principle for schools would open the door to more events like Columbine. Events have proved her right, of course.

Nel Noddings was a presence on my philosophical and personal horizon. Philosophically, I admired her phenomenological temper (nestled within analytic skills and pragmatist sensibility). At the heart of my favorite of her books, The Challenge to Care in Schools and Women and Evil, were phenomenological analyses of caring and evil respectively. She peeled back the encrusted meanings of both terms that centered women as overly emotional and uncontrollable, and then offered careful descriptions of both phenomenon as experienced that proved helpful to me in my work as an educator of teachers and leaders. In particular, her analysis of evil as unnecessary pain, unnecessary separation, and unnecessary helplessness became a touchstone in an educational leadership program we designed to take moral leadership seriously.

I also admired her willingness to follow her ideas where they took her, unafraid that the demands associated with any particular idea might be too great. I invited Nel to give the Lockey Lecture at Millersville University in the 1990s and she offered a riff on what had been her John Dewey Lecture and would become Educating for Intelligent Belief and Unbelief. What was crystal clear in that talk was the burden that educating for intelligence placed on teachers, to be so well and truly educated themselves that they could follow students’ concerns with ease, and then press students to offer the intelligent response. When asked during the Q&A about whether this was too much to expect of teachers, Nel acknowledged that she was asking a lot, but that there was no way around it. That, quite simply, was the job, especially in a democracy.

Nel is absent now. Gone is her loving engagement with ideas—and the personal kindness so many of us knew firsthand. What else will go missing? Perhaps not a lot.

I find myself pondering her absent presence. Caring is not going away, as a source, as a reference, as a pedagogical touchstone. The educational leadership program I mentioned is still going strong and Noddings’ analysis of evil is very much a part of the commitment to moral leadership. Sasha Sidorkin and a merry band of relational pedagogy advocates are meeting annually and publishing (especially in Europe) monographs that center Nel’s insight that caring is relational. I could cite many more examples; I suspect others can too.

Appreciating Nel Noddings

Lynn Sargent De Jonghe

Cobb Institute

I suspect that many of us today would be proud possessors of tee shirts that read: WHAT WOULD NEL NODDINGS DO?

This simple question has guided my own work since I first met Nel in 1978 and quickly realized that I had found not only a mentor, but also an inspiring role model. At that time, Nel was head of the Stanford Teacher Education Program; I was a Cornell graduate student struggling to complete my dissertation and find my professional bearings in Berkeley, California, 2,500 miles from my scholarly home. Despite our considerable gap in status, Nel engaged me as a respected equal. Nel encouraged me to join the philosophical discussions at California Association of Philosophy of Education and to continue my contributions to PES.

I soon realized just how much I had to learn from Nel. My husband and I had relocated from Ithaca to Berkeley to better accommodate our professional lives; Nel and her husband Jim had negotiated similar moves. Nel had transferred successfully to academia from teaching and school administration; I was wrestling to navigate the pulls of similar career currents. Nel balanced her disciplinary commitment to philosophy with other interdisciplinary interests. I was committed to a similar balancing act. I was raising two young children, but Nel was raising ten children!

Six years later, Nel published her landmark book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. That same year I founded a progressive school based on my philosophical convictions, and Nel agreed to serve on its first Board of Trustees.

Some years later Nel accepted an invitation to come to my school to give the keynote address for a conference on ‘Learning by Doing’. She and Jim spent the day at the school, visiting classes, meeting with faculty members, and attending conference sessions. These were not only acts of respect; they were also acts of extraordinary generosity. They were acts motivated by her deep commitment to providing the best education for all of our children. They were acts exemplifying the integrity of care.

As we all know, Nel went on to author twenty-two other books and countless articles. In addition to her long service to Stanford, she served as president of PES and the John Dewey Society. Nel’s work at Stanford, her tireless campaign to advance a care approach to education, and her generous support of aspiring educators has transformed teaching in countless schools across America.

Although my own career has not nearly lived up to the high standards set by Nel, the school that I founded over forty years ago is now recognized as a national model of educational innovation for the twenty-first century. Just recently I have been fortunate to publish a book on how to educate children to thrive in turbulent times. And Nel’s message of care and commitment resounds on every page and through every chapter.

Nel’s message is so resonant because every good teacher knows that the first responsibility of engaging students is to create a positive climate of shared respect and caring in the classroom. However, for many years characterized by competitive learning, behavioural objectives, and high stakes testing, this fundamental truth was often overlooked, not only in schools but in teacher training institutions as well. It took a feminist perspective to correct this devastating oversight, and we owe this revolution in large part to the work of Nel Noddings.

And that is why we rejoice for Nel, even as we mourn her passing. And that is why we continue to ask: WHAT WOULD NEL NODDINGS DO? and add: THANK YOU, NEL!

Tribute to Nel Noddings

Cris Mayo

University of Vermont

After many, many years, like everyone else, of teaching Nel Noddings’ work, what strikes me most is how difficult her project was. On the one hand, the word caring is so mundane as to be drained of its extreme difficulties, especially in institutional settings. There is something about ‘caring’ as a concept that has been rendered dangerous, especially, I think for women and other minoritized faculty. We may feel there is a risk that caring shows one is not a serious teacher. Noddings calls to rethink that risk and to be willing to extend ourselves to the particularities of each student, especially young people not yet well enough connected to subject matter. Her commitment to students and to particularity provides a model, a strategy, and a renewed attention to relationality whether we work with nontraditional students at the poverty level, hardworking undergraduates with full time jobs, graduate students working to advance and support their families on teaching assistantships, and/or students navigating borders and languages. Noddings’ work reminds us that all these different students, much like the relationships Noddings describes in Caring, are improved by keen attention to the conditions of students’ lives, their unique attachments to kinds of learning, and their desire to be confirmed, too, as people struggling through challenges. The intensity of their intellectualism thrives when more about their learning situations and their particularities are recognized.

By pointing out just how hard it is to care and further how an asymmetrical relationship may be one of the best sorts of pedagogical relationship, Nel’s work, even in times of audit culture and accountability schemes in education, kept pushing us to remember that the core of education is relationality and responsibility. When those of us who were young suspicious feminists first castigated her argument for its potential for self-abnegation (because, perhaps, we were too young and self-fascinated at the time), we missed how hard teaching and caring really is, how difficult it is to have strong beliefs as a teacher but to realize that students need our intense focus, and how difficult it was to maintain ethics in the face of institutional pressures. Her work, too, shows us how hard it is to take up a feminized virtue and offer it as the robust and serious thing it is. The feminine (the now-gone word in the original subtitle of Caring) has been cast as slight, incompetent, and shrinking: The very bulk of the force and breadth of Nel’s work has not only pushed toward a serious reconsideration of relationality, she has also demanded we rethink gender. That challenge to care—and to disrupt categories—continues even as we mourn the particularities of her own work and care.

A caring colleague and lifelong friend

Michael S. Katz

San José State University

My friendship with Nel Noddings spans five decades; we were doctoral students at Stanford in the early 1970s. I came there in 1970 and received my doctorate in 1974; Nel came there in 1971 and graduated in 1973. We were the last two students of Professor Lawrence Thomas; and we were the only two of his graduate students not writing dissertations on Dewey. We both had Julius Moravcsik as a guiding philosopher on our dissertations.

I returned to Stanford in 1984 just after Nel had published her seminal book on Caring. At that time, I had decided I would relinquish my position as a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, so that my wife Marcia might establish Stanford’s ‘Life Flight’ helicopter trauma program—a program she initiated in January of 1984. That year Nel invited me to attend her Dewey seminar at her home in Los Altos. Nel clearly understood how a sense of ‘family’ and ‘a caring community’ might be established by having a seminar in one’s home with wine and hors d’oeuvres. This is how she offered students and visiting scholars the opportunity to learn and make new friends at the same time.

What solidified my friendship with Nel Noddings was how she responded to the emotional pain I experienced after having spent a year away from my family to honor my sabbatical commitment at the University of Nebraska in 1985–1986. In June of 1986, I quit my tenured position there. Shortly thereafter, I realized that I had become ‘a teacher’—that teaching was more than a job but a ‘vocation’—a ‘calling.’ As a result, to preserve my own sense of personal integrity, I had to find a position as a teacher. That led to my taking a position as a ‘part-time lecturer’ at San Jose State University. For two years, I taught courses in ‘business ethics’ in the philosophy department and supervised elementary teachers in the department of teacher education, although I had never been an elementary teacher.

This was the most difficult period of my entire life. I was emotionally distraught much of the time. My personal sense of value disintegrated; it had been identified with my professional status as a tenured professor and author of thirteen published articles. Now I had no status whatsoever. Moreover, I did not know if I would maintain my part-time position from one semester to the next. I had no office, no citizen rights, and no sense of value as a professional.

Nel Noddings understood my emotional despair. She responded to me as a true friend. Unlike me, she had not experienced what I was experiencing when she had given up two wonderful positions earlier in her career, first at Pennsylvania State University and later at The University of Chicago. Her sense of personal well-being was not attached to how people viewed her academic standing but located in her own sense of family and personal relationships. But she understood that ‘caring’ for a friend required: a) the ability to understand and receive what her friend was experiencing, and b) the ability to respond appropriately to her friend’s emotional need and enable him to emerge from his depression, isolation, and mild despair. At one point, she said something I have remembered throughout my life, ‘Michael, as long as you are doing philosophy of education, you will always be a philosopher of education.’

Nel displayed what caring required for me at the lowest point of my personal life and professional career. She inspired me to remain committed to my career. Within two years of her caring encouragement, I received a tenure track appointment in the College of Education and became Secretary-Treasurer in the Philosophy of Education Society in 1988 when D. C. Phillips was elected President. Later as a full professor, I was elected President of the Philosophy of Education Society.

For over fifty years, I have remained Nel’s good friend and colleague, visiting her regularly at her home on the Jersey Shore, having dinners and lunches with her and Jim, watching her tend to her garden. Recently Denis Phillips asked me to write about her view on caring for his massive Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education. I was honored to do that.

As others have pointed out, Nel Noddings wrote profoundly about caring and its relationship to education. In so doing, she reoriented the ethics of education and other professional fields. Most importantly, she fully embodied what caring meant throughout her personal and professional friendship with me—and so many hundreds of others. Nel Noddings modelled what true friendship was at its most profound level. Moreover, she demonstrated that friendship could be married to collegiality and mentorship. The quality of her friendships transcended the realm of her academic profession; that is one reason her legacy will shine forever.

Nel Noddings: Caring personified³

Robert Lake

Georgia Southern University

From my first encounter with Nel Noddings onward, I can clearly say that she truly embodied the notion of care. I will take this further by saying that the way she lived provided those that ‘read her life’ with the most important and life changing book on ‘the challenge to care’ (i.e. her lived experience). As Noddings wrote over a quarter of a century ago, ‘We do not merely tell them to care and give them texts to read on the subject, we demonstrate our caring in our relations.’ As a friend of mine once pointed out, ‘that would be like being invited over to a person’s house for lasagna and you arrive only to find that the recipe is taped to your plate.’ The examples that are shared in this collective obituary consistently bear witness to this. Indeed, one of the themes running through the stories each person shares about the life of Nel Noddings is that she was consistent in demonstrating Martin Buber’s notion of confirmation as the ‘act of affirming and encouraging the best in others’ (1998, p. 132). This comes out of getting to know the ‘cared for’ in a manner that enables the recognition of aspects of development that are ‘struggling to emerge’, but need encouragement and nurturing.

I was struck by the profound clarity of the way Noddings expressed this in her writing as I was writing my dissertation, so I decided to try to contact her personally. I found her home telephone number listed in the member directory of the John Dewey Society and explained why I was calling. I instantly felt valued by her tone and wisdom. After several questions about how she self-identified as a philosopher of education I realized that you could not fit her into one of the ‘theoretical frameworks’ we were studying in our doctoral level curriculum theory classes. We did not talk long, but one of the questions I asked was ‘How do you maintain hopeful imagination in times like the ones we are living through now?’ She said, ‘I work in my garden, hug my cat, and watch the sun rise over the ocean’ (personal communication, September 4, 2006). She could not have told me anything more powerful than that. Since then, I have discovered more about her love of cats and even found where she wrote that she ‘learned the meanings of a variety of cat vocalizations’ (2005, p.128). I think about Nel with her cats when I am caring for and being cared by my three cats.

The other parts of her answer to me also left an indelible impression by literally drawing inspiration from witnessing the way that nature continuously renews itself. We can draw from its forces by some variety of continual exposure to it. This brings me to the ‘working in the garden’ part of her answer which I connect to meditation and cultivation of living things. When Noddings discusses our reciprocal relationship with nature she quotes Wendell Berry:

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes in health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it, we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. (quoted in Noddings, 2005, pp. 134–135)

To bring this down to where we live, one aspect of this great connecting relationship with the earth is that as we care for it we have time to ponder and ruminate. For example, I find that mowing the lawn is a time when I have some of my most fruitful episodes of thinking and bringing ideas together. Noddings refers to this as incubation (1984). I suspect that in incubation personal metaphoric connections are created that give rise to personal understanding and empowerment that are the marks of valid learning experiences. Almost everyone has had the experience of breaking through obstacles in problem solving after a short time of retreat and rumination. It may be anything from a plumbing problem, writer’s block, or envisioning the theory of relativity, as in the case of Einstein. Obviously, some concepts need more applied contemplation than others, yet there are some characteristics of problem solving that are common to all humans and certainly should be considered and cultivated in the lives of those we teach.

How might incubation be allowed to work in actual classroom practice? Modell (2003) suggests that ‘what makes us uniquely human is an unconscious metaphoric process’ (p. 25). Metaphor is not just a fanciful rhetorical device. Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) posit that ‘metaphor is a neural phenomenon’ (p. 256). Neural networks are created in the brain by the combination of subconscious memory and experience through metaphoric connections. Consequently, metaphor is a tangible, physiological connector of the subconscious and conscious, the new and old, and the mental and physical through means of visual, verbal, somatic, and auditory concepts. Modell affirms this notion by further saying that ‘metaphor formation is intrinsically multimodal, as it must engage visual, auditory and kinesthetic inputs’ (2003, p. 32). This holistic process needs incubation time. Sometimes this may occur while one is in a half state of sleep or walking or contemplatively reading, or just allowing students to have quiet time during the day.

One of the things I ask my preservice teacher candidates to observe in their field experience is the length of time a teacher allows before the ‘right’ answer is spoken out. In today’s frenzied pace of life where even ‘minute rice is cooked in a microwave’ (Mike Shreve, personal communication, 1987), and literal floods of information from microchips is the order of the day, teachers and students alike need to create spaces for incubation along with the wise restraint to enable each student to peck their own way out of the shell.

Notes

1 This contribution was previously published in Dear Nel: Opening the Circles of Care (Letters to Nel Noddings), ed. R. Lake. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012.

2 This contribution has been adapted from a previous publication in Dear Nel: Opening the Circles of Care (Letters to Nel Noddings), ed. R. Lake. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012.

3 This contribution has been adapted from a previous publication in Dear Nel: Opening the Circles of Care (Letters to Nel Noddings), ed. R. Lake. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012.