The adventure of responsive teaching: lessons from Cora and Julie Diamond

ABSTRACT

This essay has several related goals. The first is to contribute to the philosophy of education literature on Cora Diamond while introducing the work of her sister, Julie Diamond, to the field. I introduce Julie Diamond’s work by connecting it to the work of John Dewey, and a secondary goal of the paper is to test lines of connection between Dewey and Cora Diamond. Finally, by developing Cora and Julie Diamond’s thinking on teaching and the moral life, I hope to contribute to conversations in teacher education, especially ongoing conversations about the meaning of responsive teaching. The first half of the paper discusses and engages Cora Diamond’s thinking on the moral life drawing on a range of her published work, the middle of the paper builds a bridge from Cora Diamond to Dewey as a way of introducing Julie Diamond, and the final part of the paper offers an engagement with Julie Diamond’s work. I discuss teaching throughout the paper, and my hope is that a vision of responsive teaching, one grounded in the work of Julie and Cora Diamond, emerges that allows teachers to come alive to aspects of their work that can disappear in the rush and whirl of classroom life. The paper begins with a personal story as a way of connecting with the style of Cora and Julie Diamond’s approach to teaching and the moral life.

Acknowledgments

It was a tremendous gift to work on this special issue with Megan Laverty. Her careful attention to each submission was a model I aspire to. I’ve had to good fortune to talk Diamond with her since I was a graduate student, and I look forward to continuing this conversation. I also appreciate Áine Mahon’s insight and support from the very beginning of this process. Finally, I am grateful to Paul Smeyers for welcoming this project and for helping at every stage of the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The abstract offers a roadmap of the article. As I mention in the abstract, I jump right into this essay with a personal story.

2. Readers may wish to draw parallels between my understanding of staying awake to Maxine Greene’s (1977) thinking on ‘wide awakeness.’ I do not draw on this connection here, but readers interested in developing it may also gain from consulting Rodgers’s (2020) recent book on presence in teaching.

3. As I will discuss in more detail below, this is an interesting point of connection between Cora Diamond and John Dewey. For a discussion on Dewey’s thinking on fixed possibilities, see Frank (2020).

4. Stanley Cavell (1999) discusses the issue of the rejected child quite movingly in The Claim of Reason. For a discussion, see Frank (2017).

5. Though I cannot develop this connection with the attention it deserves, one might work to connect Diamond’s thinking and Jonathan Lear’s (2011) thinking on irony. Lear responds generously to Diamond’s work, and I begin to trace some connections between Lear, Diamond and education elsewhere (Frank 2019c).

6. There is a rich and very interesting literature on this topic, one I won’t go into here. Most of the literature is on the relationship between Dewey and Cavell, because Cavell is explicit in distancing himself from (his understanding of) Dewey. Some examples of literature that demonstrates the ways that Dewey is more complex and closer to Cavell – and, by extension, Diamond – than Cavell lets on, see Laverty (2017). Colapietro (2004), Jackson (1992), and Rodgers (2009). I don’t need to settle anything in the debates that exist in this literature to make the point I am trying to make in this paper, namely that there are aspects of Dewey’s thinking that are close enough to aspects of Diamond’s thinking to make plausible my suggestion that even though Julie Diamond is largely influenced by the philosophy of Dewey, this doesn’t mean that I cannot draw lessons from her teaching practice that help us understand important aspects of Cora Diamond’s philosophy.

7. One might also investigate Dewey’s (1925, 233) comments on Charles Dickens to draw connections between Dewey’s thinking on the moral value of literature and Diamond’s thinking on the ways that Dickens helps us expand our understanding of the moral.

8. In a very confusing move, Diamond’s publisher has recently started selling this book under the title Kindergarten: A Teacher, Her Students, and a Year of Learning. They are the exact same book. But to make matters even more unclear, Diamond (2015) also published a wonderful edited book with the title Teaching Kindergarten.

9. Though I only briefly touch on Cora and Julie Diamond’s connections to Leo Tolstoy, I borrow this phrase from an outstanding study of Tolstoy’s work, Gary Saul Morson’s (1987) Hidden in Plain View.