With a clear and simple style, argued from the ethics of care - ethics related to being attentive, caring, concern, responsible and, recognizing the voice of the woman - Nel Noddings explains why the American education must change its orientation, and the challenge to implement in the school curriculum, the concept of care - understood as a way of being in regards of human relationships - as a central theme. For the author, the main objective of education should be moral, that is, promoting the development of competent and careful people, not only promoting the excellence and competition in the traditional disciplines of education. Therefore, her proposal is to organize the curriculum in a structured network of relationships around circles of care: care for oneself, care for intimate family of friends, care for strangers; care for animals, plants and the Earth; care for the human made world; and lastly care for the world of ideas.
Nel Noddings’ circles of care play a pivotal role in our project. Every class, kids in the south Bronx learn and film based upon these circles.
The first classes were focused on the first circle, the self. Kids did their assignments reflecting about the self. On their first assignment, they had to film about them selves without appearing in any part of the footage. The assignment turned out to be a very interesting one, because children used very different techniques to accomplish their mission, like filming their siblings talking about them, or filming things they love to do. It was amazing to see how every single kid figure out how to talk about them without appearing on the film.
After that, they started “spiraling out” onto other circles of care, exploring different topics and learning different media types. The idea of this spiral of care, is that kids are able to spiral in and spiral out. For instance, while they upload information regarding their footage to the blog, kids are spiraling out to the circle of ideas, and they spiral back to whichever circle they are learning and filming.
Published by Ximena Maroto and Ayelet Vardi
