Scripting Feminist Ethics in Teacher Education - Paperback

by Michelle Forrest (Author), Linda Wheeldon (Author)

In an intriguing and original style, these authors, who are philosophers of education, teachers and performing artists, offer a rich resource for understanding the history, process, and value of feminist consciousness-raising for teacher-educators and feminist teachers. Critical incidents in today's classrooms involving values relativism, the rush to judgement, witnessing to vulnerability, cyber-bullying, and countering determinism in teacher education and research are analyzed using key concepts from philosophers and feminist theorists. Weaving together personal narrative, dramatization, literary allusion, and philosophical reconstruction, they analyze key concepts from post-structuralism, philosophy of education, feminist standpoint epistemology, and post-feminist critique, and question the place of the personal in the teacher's ethical responsibility for moral deliberation in pluralistic classrooms. This book has value for teacher-educators helping pre-service teachers develop the critical and sensitive capacities needed to be the voice of authority in a classroom. Although these scripts are fictionalizations of real dilemmas in school teaching and teacher education, the ethical questions they raise have repercussions for teaching professional ethics in other care-giving professions. Going to the heart of the teacher's worst fears and assumptions, this unique work offers a new approach to the analysis of case studies in philosophy of education and is sure to capture the moral imagination of anyone concerned about truth-telling and the place of authority in education today.

Author Biography

Michelle Forrest is a professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, a singer, and a performing artist. She writes and teaches about the ethics of teaching, collaborative inquiry, feminist pedagogy, and the value of art and philosophy in challenging bias, certainty, and closed-mindedness in education.