SOCIAL STUDIES AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ETHICS: THE RISKS OF ABSTRACTION

No doubt we can all imagine situations where the philosophy of ethics, and indeed social studies, might be taught as if learners are in an art gallery and expected to observe the retrospective of someone else’s creativity, from behind a white floor-marked line that divides the expert from the observer. Perhaps we might say that this has something to do with philosophy itself. In vastly different projects and contexts, for example, John Dewey and Martin Heidegger have questioned the roles and goals of philosophy (R. Rorty, 1976). Dewey wanted to turn away from philosophy as a distinctive activity altogether and argued, instead, for a logic of inquiry “as a model for all forms of disciplined reflection” (Blattner, 2008, p. 58) that would both engage with learners’ experience and more readily address society’s problems. Heidegger essentially felt that philosophy, trapped in its own language of analytic reasoning, had moved further and further from a consideration of a way of being in the world. He argued that we access the world not through the abstractedness of philosophy but through being immersed in activities, projects, and practices.

There is much that divides these philosophers; Heidegger, for example, avowedly rejected epistemology whereas Dewey did not. But there is something in the flavour of their work that wrestles with a distinction between philosophy as an academic enterprise and ‘real life’. Each perceives the discipline as having distanced itself from lived

experience. I mention these authors here because their work inflects this chapter’s discussion, but they are not the only theorists to have raised such meta-philosophical problems (Joll, 2010), nor are they issues that social studies may resolve. The salient insight for this thesis is, instead, the danger of importing the philosophy of ethics into

experience, and real-world concerns. The problem is not that the philosophy of ethics’ potential contribution to social studies is conceptual, academic, or rigorous – it is how it is used. I point out, therefore, the risks of abstraction.

The sense in which I use notions of distancing and abstractedness is akin to Donald Schön’s (1983, 1987) conception of ‘reflection-on-action’ in teachers’ professional work. By this he means that the real work of learning to be a teacher is mistakenly perceived as coming after the fact when one has the opportunity to step back and reflect on the lessons learned. The analogy here would be to think of ethics education as existing solely in classrooms rather than in the everyday experiences of life, or as an exercise that is perennially in retrospect. Schön argues that the reflection-on-action model is

exacerbated by a climate of ‘technical rationality’, positioning teacher educators as the deliverers of pre-packaged knowledge and where teachers “often collude in seeing the truth as lying wholly outside themselves, regarding as ‘higher’ the knowledge that appears more general, abstract and theoretical” (Schön, 1992, p. 121). Again by analogy, the risk is that the social studies learner comes to see the ways that they already navigate in the swampy, indeterminate nature (to use Schön’s metaphor) of their ethical life as something lesser than the seemingly assured higher ground of a classroom lesson in ethics.

Schön’s contribution to education lies in drawing attention to the previously, and arguably still, marginalised aspects of professional practice and learning. Critically, he is not rejecting ‘expert’ knowledge. Instead, and in a genealogy that owes much to Dewey, Schön argued for much greater research attention to reflection within action – the artistry of practitioners’ decision-making. Within this, he saw a variety of complex components.

Knowing-in-action, for example, is the “knowing built into and revealed by our

performance of everyday routines of action” (Schön, 1992, p. 124) such as riding a bike, and is akin to the notion of blindsight introduced in Chapter One. This type of

reflection is to be distinguished from Dewey’s notion of a felt difficulty because the situation does not feel problematic. By contrast, reflection-in-action is our ability to take note of surprise and respond to it in a fleeting moment. Conversation with the (uncertain) situation is, for Schön, much more like Deweyan inquiry: “mediated by conscious reflection and, at the same time, on one’s way of thinking and acting on it” (p. 126). There is much that is open to question in Schön’s work. The difficulty in finding examples that match ethical experience makes me somewhat uncomfortable about this typology. Moreover, and as others have pointed out (Munby, 1989), Schön relies on

dualistic thinking to make his argument for greater attention to ‘the swamp’ as opposed to the ‘higher ground’ of academic thought, and to distinguish between reflection-on- action and reflection within action. Alan Bleakley (1999) argues Schön’s thesis “paradoxically smacks of the kind of technical mapping that Schön opposes in principle” (p. 322) when he equates developing teachers’ artistry and capacity to improvise with good coaching and modelling.

Schön is not, of course, directly commenting on ethics education in social studies. But, despite the previously expressed reservations, and in extending his work into the purposes of this thesis, I contend that, like teaching practice, learners’ everyday

experience may be conceived as sites for “generating, not only applying, usable knowledge” (Schön, 1992, p. 134). The role of the philosophy of ethics in social studies may

therefore be contrasted against ‘banking education’, in the Freirean sense (see Freire, 1986), where the teacher issues ethical communiqués and deposits the insights of philosophy. Perhaps today this distinction seems rather crude. Surely no educator sees their practice in these terms? As I explore in subsequent chapters, much of the

philosophy education literature strenuously resists a banking model. But abstraction and distancing are, anecdotally, challenges already faced in New Zealand social studies education. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine, for example, that the history of ethical ideas might be left in the past or that a glossary of ethical terms would be relegated to the back pages of learners’ notebooks. Furthermore, there is some risk of the definition I have provided for ethics, exacerbating the distance between ethics and learners’ lives (see below). This is because the definition infers that the role of the student is to consider accepted wisdom – to assimilate or accommodate that information, or perhaps even to reject it – but not to generate wisdom. It positions learners as being in a dialogic relationship with ethical perspectives, but there appears to be nothing outside of theory. It is as if learners are locked in a reflective bubble,

divorced from their existence. In voicing a similar concern in the context of higher education, and in arguing for an ‘ontological turn’, Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2007) argue that knowing is not merely intellectual; it is inhabited, enacted and transformative. Drawing on Heidegger, they urge a much closer coupling between “formal and propositional knowledge, and the informal kind of knowing that arises out of being in the world” (p. 683).

…meaning both the branch of philosophy concerned with the systematic study of what we ought to do, and an activity – that of coming to an understanding of, and

reflecting upon, a range of perspectives about social action.

To use Schön’s metaphor, this chapter attempts to re-balance the scales of the definition (above) for ethics in the direction of learners’ swamps. This is because there is

something more that I wish to capture in relation to bringing the philosophy of ethics into social studies learning – about learners as ethical beings, dealing with the everyday, emotive, indeterminate, and emergent nature of ethical decision-making and action. As an index43 _{to this, I was initially attracted to the idea of reflexivity, rather like a magpie}

attracted to the shiny quality of a newly found item. As the reader will see, others have similarly been drawn to reflexivity, but for all manner of reasons. The work undertaken in the next sections of this chapter is three-fold. I firstly consider the term critical reflection in order to set this apart from my use of reflexivity. The following section surveys the ways in which reflexivity has been employed in social theory and the social sciences. I then consider whether this concept has any force in social studies education, and what precisely reflexivity is an index to in the context of better supporting learners’ ethical decision-making and action.