Teaching with a different ear: Teaching ethics after reading Carol Gilligan
✍ Scribed by Deborah Slicer
- Book ID
- 104643406
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1990
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 705 KB
- Volume
- 24
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5363
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
I want to talk about how reading Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice has caused me to hear my students differently -how I have taken to teaching with a "different ear," so to speak. I also want to recommend that philosophy educators, especially those who teach ethics, read Gilligan with the similar aim of training the ear.
Gilligan is concerned that developmental psychology has charted paths of human development, models of successful growth, derived from empirical studies which exclude women. These paths, not surprisingly, fail to chart women's developmental progress. Gilligan shows how, rather than faulting the models, psychologists tend to fault their female subjects for not progressing along the same paths males tend to follow. Psychologists are prescribing rather than describing their findings, and subjects who fail to measure up to those prescriptions, for example, most women and those males whose socio-economic or ethnic backgrounds differ from the study's subjects, are considered, to use Gilligan's words, "developmental failures." Gilligan is quite convincing when she argues that Freud, Piaget, Erickson, and her Harvard colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg, each commit this fallacy.
Kohlberg claims that women tend not to reach stage six, the "highest" or most "adequate" stage of his moral growth model. At this stage dilemmas are abstracted from their concrete and particular contexts, and generally articulated in terms of conflicting universal principles of rights, justice and equality. Resolution strategies consist in working through the logic of those concepts in order to prioritize the conflicting principles. Kohlberg's claim that this type of thinking is somehow more mature or more "adequate" than other types begs many questions, as Marilyn Friedman, Owen Flanagan, and Gflligan have quite convincingly shown. It is not at all clear that women are the moral failures that psychology all along has made them out to be.
I believe that a similar unhappy scenario is prevalent in the ethics classroom; that we prescribe a philosophic model much like the sixth stage of Kohlberg's developmental model. We train our students to think about themselves as moral