The Noddings Center

     Traditional courses are not absent from the curriculum, nor taught in isolation.  Courses that we think of as traditional core courses (English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies) are taught with the themes of care as the basis and taught in an interdisciplinary manner.   In an interview for Arizona State University's Inside the Academy series, Nel Noddings explained that "[t]he curriculum that we have in place is pretty much what they had when Plato put it in. Now we’ve got computer science. If they’d had computers, I’m sure Plato would have had computer science in there. But what you can do, and what I find enormously powerful is, you can stretch the disciplines from within..." (Amrein-Beardsley, A., 2010, time 10:00).

 

     “When teachers say, ... ‘How can I do this on top of everything else that I’m asked to do?’ My answer is always, ‘It isn’t on top of everything else, it’s underneath everything else.’ The time you spend on caring and kindness, decency, and how we treat one another is so fundamental, that everything else goes better as a result of it” (Kindness in the Classroom Continuing Education Course, minute 0:55 to 1:20).

 

     Noddings (2005b) explained the need for centers of care as "[r]elations with intimate others are the beginning and one of the significant ends of moral life. In supportive environments where children learn how to respond to dependable caring, they can begin to develop the capacity to care. Whether their caring will be directed to the people around them, however, depends in part on the expectations of their teachers--the adults who guide them and serve as models for them" (p. 52).