23 Facts About Nel Noddings

Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.

Nel Noddings worked in many areas of the education system.

Nel Noddings spent seventeen years as an elementary and high school mathematics teacher and school administrator, before earning her PhD and beginning work as an academic in the fields of philosophy of education, theory of education and ethics, specifically moral education and ethics of care.

Nel Noddings became a member of the Stanford faculty in 1977, and was the Jacks Professor of Child Education from 1992 until 1998.

Nel Noddings served as president of the Philosophy of Education Society and the John Dewey Society.

Nel Noddings was Lee L Jacks Professor of Education, emerita, at Stanford University from 1998.

Nel Noddings has 10 children, 39 grandchildren, and over 20 great-grandchildren, many of whom are highly educated and educators themselves.

Nel Noddings added, 'I like having pets and kids around'.

Nel Noddings had described her early educational experiences and her close relationships as key in her development of her philosophical position.

Nel Noddings's first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan's ground-breaking work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice.

Besides contributing to philosophy, Nel Noddings worked in the field of social psychology.

Nel Noddings was on the editorial board of Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley.

Nel Noddings's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

However, unlike Gilligan, Nel Noddings's believes that caring, 'rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness' is a more basic and preferable approach to ethics.

Nel Noddings believes that it would be a mistake to try to provide a systematic examination of the requirements for caring; nevertheless, she does suggest three requirements for caring.

Nel Noddings argues that the carer must exhibit engrossment and motivational displacement, and the person who is cared for must respond in some way to the caring.

Finally, Nel Noddings believes that caring requires some form of recognition from the cared-for that the one-caring is, in fact, caring.

When I care for someone because "I must" care, say I hug an acquaintance who needs hugging in spite of my desire to escape that person's pain, according to Nel Noddings, I am engaged in ethical caring.

Nel Noddings describes wrong actions in terms of "a diminishment of the ethical ideal" and "evil".

Nel Noddings writes, "[when] one intentionally rejects the impulse to care and deliberately turns her back on the ethical, she is evil, and this evil cannot be redeemed".

Those who accept more traditional approaches to ethics argue that the partiality shown to those closest to us in Nel Noddings's theory is inappropriate.

Nel Noddings tends to use unequal relationships as a model for understanding caring.

In "Identifying Needs in Education" Nel Noddings provides criteria for deciding whether a want should be recognized or treated as a need.