Noddings, Nel

Nel Noddings (1929–), U.S. philosopher of education, is widely recognized for contributions across her illustrious career to curriculum conception and reform. Across her writings, curriculum has always held pride of place; for her it is the backbone of schooling. And in effect, no reform should be undertaken without its specific attention. Emblematic of this curriculum emphasis, in 2000, Division B, Curriculum Studies, of the American Educational Research Association, awarded [Page 612]Noddings its Distinguished Career Award. Central to an international reputation, her prose is direct, pithy, and accessible, and is thus useful to scholars and practitioners alike. Occasional paraphrasing from key texts is sprinkled throughout this entry.

Noddings's biography mirrors her general commitment to education through a multiplicity of opportunities and based in the contributions of each individual to a democratic society. From working-class roots, she earned undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees from Montclair State, Rutgers, and Stanford universities, respectively. Her professional life began as a mathematics teacher, curriculum developer and school administrator, and college instructor. A faculty member at several institutions, her principal tenure was at Stanford University as assistant and full professor and as a dean. She often taught courses that focused on or included curriculum theory and application. By 2008, she was the author of 16 books and had published individual pieces almost too numerous to count. She is also a frequent speaker in the United States and elsewhere. Among many honors, she was elected president of the National Academy of Education, the Philosophy of Education Society (North America), and the John Dewey Society.

From a beginning in mathematics education, Noddings's curriculum interests have developed in support of a comprehensive reform position for schooling and education broadly. A basic premise is critique of today's dominant standard and standardized liberal arts curriculum. This is because no persons are exactly alike and schooling should not support such an explicit or implicit agenda. Instead, there should be a rich array of attractive curricula and facilitation for informed choices by students.

Moreover, although predominantly employing language of needs and wants rather than rights, she posits that the present age of “accountability” has meant unrealized equal outcomes and continued inequity. Societal resources matter as does continued discussion of aims of education. For Noddings, aims, accountability, and opportunity become matters of ethics. Both for individuals and society, the general model is one of relation and encounter. The ethical ideal is relations between persons in ordered pairs that are extended to relations with others. Noddings poses that education for ethics occurs for the young through well-chosen encounters and their effects to trigger deep affect. Genuine relations through genuine encounters multiply.

Across writings, educational and curriculum reform is substantiated through a set of thematics. Surely not exhaustive of curriculum topics, they include her position toward mathematics, proposal for a broad vocationalism, specific focus on the personal lives and everyday interests of children and adults, and attention to the contributions from women's culture for the benefit of everyone. First, Noddings loves mathematics (for many years, a small blackboard principally for working math problems was prominent in her Stanford office). The educational point, ironically and significantly, is that for her everyone need not love mathematics and there should be no strict, narrow requirements for mathematics for everyone. As one outcome of student choice and curriculum differentiation, Noddings offers a general proposal for schools to promote happiness. One arena of personal happiness is preparation for work, as the second theme and as a broad conception of vocation in the curriculum. As across much of her theorizing on curriculum, she begins with critique of existing practices. In this case, schools seem to have forgotten that work is for more than economic preparation. A much-needed curriculum reform is to educate for a wide set of occupations—to appreciate any honest work and to be exposed to and explore many kinds of formal and informal work in the curriculum.

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