Documenting the Influence of Noddings’s Theory of Care in Moral Education and Philosophy of Education: 2003-2013

Abstract

Educational research has a broad scope of interest; and, since Ancient Greece, it has constantly interacted with other fields such as ethics, social work, and psychology. For centuries, scholars and researchers have struggled to answer the questions: What is moral knowledge? How do we acquire moral knowledge? What does education mean? The need to answer these questions has motivated educational theorists and philosophers to construct new and thought-provoking educational theories. Many educational theorists and philosophers have improved and/or challenged the theories of interest over time, but few have constructed their own theories. Nel Noddings, a well-respected educational philosopher and a moral theorist, has provided comprehensive answers to these questions through the Theory of Care she constructed. The Theory of Care has been influential in different fields of research, and scholars have paid attention to her theory since Noddings has first discussed it in 1984. The influence of Theory of Care (TC) has been documented in certain fields of research; however, its influence in the fields of moral education and philosophy of education, the fields harboring the essential research on this theory, has gone undocumented. The aim of this dissertation was to fill this gap in educational research while providing insights regarding the influence of Noddings’s TC and how several authors have used TC in the fields of moral education and philosophy of education from 2003 through 2013. Drawing on the articles published in two journals representative of the fields of interest, an analysis was done about how Noddings’s TC has influenced and potentially contributed to the educational problems discussed in these fields of research and its influence through the issues discussed in these journals is described. Because Noddings is one of the most frequently cited authors in the theoretical fields of education, for the sake of manageability, the sample for this project only included the articles, which mainly discussed Noddings’s TC and were published in the Journal of Moral Education and the Journal of Philosophy of Education from 2003 through 2013. There exist two different, yet interactive, phases in the analysis of these articles in addition to being able to read TC using a critical and systematic lens. The analysis of articles for this dissertation revealed that TC has been mostly influential and contributed to the discussion of particular concepts, including school culture, relational thinking in/of moral education and philosophy of education, theories of moral philosophy and education, student’s needs, and the practical implications of theoretical knowledge. Noddings’s Theory of Care has been discussed in connection with each one of these concepts, sometimes only in one field of interest, sometimes in both fields of interest. These concepts indicated that the influence of TC in the fields of moral education and philosophy of education has been significant and has contributed to educational research by either beginning the conversation or changing the way it is.