Abstract
In the following interview, Meira Levinson (Harvard Graduate School) discusses the field of educational ethics and how it can enhance justifiable youth activism to enact citizenship education and recover democracy. She introduces readers to her philosophical approach for developing normative case studies that aim to be inclusive of divergent views on knowledge and value in schooling. Professor Levinson visited the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia, in August 2018, to advise the Educational Ethics: Dilemmas of Diversity Network project team. During her visit she discussed with local teachers and school leaders about how educational practices can ethically address differences, diversities and decision-making in pluralist democracies.
It is wonderful to have you visiting us here in Australia, a real pleasure. This special issue of Global Studies of Childhood is looking at different kinds of contemporary ethical tensions for working with children and young people in schools. We are hoping to open philosophically sensitive questions up to a broad group of theoretically inclined scholars who have practical interests in early childhood, primary and secondary education, and public policy, not just to education researchers and teachers but also to those in health research and health education programmes. You are a political philosopher working in the area of Educational Ethics and engaging with today’s urgent problems of education. The dilemmas you have developed, as Normative Case Studies, and the pedagogical approach that you take to create engagement about them gives opportunities for substantial dialogue across these fields (Levinson, 2018a; Levinson 2018b). You’re aiming for wise decision-making and part of this pedagogic process is the experience of being challenged by an expert set of divergent commentary. These texts have very rich and authentic narratives creating believable, engaging, but unforgiving dilemmas. As a philosopher, you take a ‘muddy boots approach’ to your work. Can you explain why this approach is important for teachers and researchers who are keen to engage with the issues of ethics in education?
In some ways, the important thing is not for me to answer why philosophers should put on boots and get them muddy. But actually, to answer what philosophers might be able to provide in the field that other disciplines don’t necessarily. I think that educators and policymakers and parents and others who are involved in education confront ethical dilemmas all the time in our work. Sometimes we’re aware of those ethical dilemmas and sometimes we’re not. When we do confront those ethical dilemmas – at least in the United States – and I have the impression, actually this is true more globally, it often feels as if we can’t talk about them with others. We are more stumped about talking about our ethical dilemmas than we are, say, talking about pedagogical dilemmas or issues around leadership or strategy or human capital, for example. There, we have increasingly a culture of conversation about the challenges that we face in doing good work. But, when it comes to the values that we enact in our practices or in our policies, we don’t really have a culture of inquiry or of collaborative construction of ethical practice and policy.
We feel as if we need to be perfect, that we are expected to be ethical teachers, ethical school leaders, ethical Ministers of Education or school Board Members. If we enact a policy or a practice that might be ethically problematic, that might violate the values that we hold dear, then that’s a matter of shame and it’s a failure on our part. I think that we need to get past that condemnation. As a teacher, even as quite an experienced teacher, it’s now often okay for me to say, I don’t know how to do that well. For example, I can’t really figure out how to provide multiple means of representation and get through the curriculum that I’m supposed to get through. Can I come observe in your classroom, can we start a critical friends group about this?
We can have those kinds of conversations. But we don’t have the kinds of conversations where we say, I should be realising values of equity or inclusion or fairness or accountability or democracy or transparency in my practice, but I’m not sure how to do that here. We open ourselves up and get condemnation. But fairness is equally hard for us to achieve as it is for us to achieve high-quality pedagogical leadership or strategy and so on. We are likely not to become better at it until we have a culture of conversation around it.
I think that those with some philosophical training can be helpful because we are trained that values and principles are complicated and that they are not obvious and that they may clash. Even interpreting any one principle may be extremely hard. So it’s great that you stand for fairness, but now that you have a diverse array of children in front of you, or a diverse array of schools in front of you, or a diverse array of school districts in front of you – what does fairness mean? How does that play out in a particular instance where you were thinking about budgets, or you were thinking about teacher allocations, or evaluating student achievement?
As philosophers we recognise that it would be absurd to expect easy answers. But, the problem with philosophy unfortunately, is that as in so many aspects of theory, the theory has developed often independent of the kinds of practical questions that people on the ground are engaged with. For example, there’s very well worked out liberal, political theory based on the work of John Rawls and the Theory of Justice, and the idea of fairness. This philosophy argues that what we should be doing when we are trying to achieve justice as fairness is to serve the interests of the least advantaged. If we are going to have inequalities in, say, resources, our practices should raise the floor, so that the least advantaged among us have more advantages as a result.
I think it’s great in theory, but in practice, what does that mean? Who is least advantaged in education, is itself a shifting phenomenon. A shifting metric that itself gets changed by education. In Dilemmas of Educational Ethics (Levinson and Fay, 2016), I have a normative case study for teachers, which focuses on a student who has some emotional and behavioural issues that means she’s actually missed a lot of school with her peers. She is in some ways the least advantaged in that she has the greatest number of social and emotional needs and she’s also missed out on some academics. There’s also another child there who has language processing issues and who is nervous enough and sort of ashamed enough about his challenges, that he tends to just kind of withdraw if he worries that he is not able to do the work. Then you have a child who is academically quite ambitious and high achieving. In this case, they are engaged in a science lesson classifying rocks and they each have different needs.
What should the teacher do at that moment, to serve the interests of the least advantaged? Well, Kate might be the least advantaged at that moment, but to serve her needs may actually then cause Frank, the kid with the language processing challenges to withdraw. He is really engaged in the science lesson. If the teacher intervenes in a way that is most likely to serve Kate, Frank may then just cut out of there. Right now we are having this magical moment where Frank is really engaged in the material and in the class. He is actually pushing back against Philip, who is the academically high achieving kid, which is quite unusual.
So you don’t want to take the short-term view about least advantaged and then end up building in long-term structural disadvantages for Frank. In fact, if you gave Frank the tools that he needs to overcome his language processing challenges, he could be incredibly smart and could end up exceeding Philip. He may never suffer academic disadvantage again. So in fact this theoretical construct of inequality serving the least advantaged, may be theoretically quite beautiful and quite exquisitely worked out, but it doesn’t tell us what to do in practice. So that’s where I think we need to engage in much more concrete collaborations among philosophers and educators and sociologists and anthropologists in research about policy and so forth, to work together to both define questions that matter to people who are wrestling with them in practice. Then to think through how we co-construct answers that are explicit about the ethical considerations and also take in considerations from research and practice.
Some of your recent projects (Justice in Schools and Youth in Front) have focused on developing pedagogical resources for issues of child safety in the US such as child detention, the school to prison pipeline and gun control action. Can you explain why those issues should be of concern to scholars and those who work with children and young people? Are these only US-based issues, or do you see global links? These are such politically charged spaces right now, how do you go about intervening in these issues?
In a way, that’s a privilege that I have as a Harvard Professor that I would not have necessarily if I was a public school teacher. Firstly, I wouldn’t have had the time or the resources and secondly, I didn’t need to worry about taking a stand. It is about protecting students and the ways in which schools should be protected spaces for kids. Schools have an obligation to simultaneously protect them from the world because of their vulnerability and to prepare them for the world, so they won’t remain vulnerable in ways that are inappropriate. Part of what we’re doing at Justice in Schools is to try to move from vulnerability to agency. From protecting them and keeping them safe to enabling them to have the agency to lead the lives that they want to lead and to change the world in ways that makes sense from their perspective.
Schools often are remarkably indifferent to some of the most basic aspects of children’s vulnerability around their physical well-being. I think if you were to look at children who have taken civic action projects around the world, my guess is that the model civic action project that kids take on is around school bathrooms. You always see kids engaged in work around school bathrooms. Either, lack of bathrooms, their dirtiness, the fact that they may not have doors or for privacy. Girls’ sense of vulnerability in the bathrooms, whether or not there are places for girls with menstruation. Provision of toilet paper, of soap. All around the world kids are engaged in work around their bathrooms.
It’s such a fundamental expression of either respect or disrespect for somebody is to let them have that basic sanitation and privacy. We so often show children the disrespect of not providing them with clean, respectful, private places for that. I think that a country’s demonstration of care for its most vulnerable is sort of key to what that country is as a place. The values that it stands for. In the United States, it is protecting students from being massacred in school. Protecting them from being ripped apart from their families due to, say, deportation or their parents being picked up to be deported when they’re dropping their kids off at school.
Protecting them from the risk of physical assault, emotional assault, denial of their humanity through some things that we teach. There’s a continuum, but this basic notion that we should be protecting the vulnerable in creating spaces in which children’s agency can thrive. Happily, the majority of countries around the world have not decided that it is more important to protect people’s rights to own guns than to protect children from the risk of massacre in places of learning, like the United States has. Nonetheless, I do think that in most countries around the world, we fail in some ways to recognise children’s vulnerability and to protect them in the ways that we should and in a way that also sets them up for future agency.
You’ve argued for the establishment of a sub-field called ‘educational ethics’ that you compared to bio-ethics in your keynote at the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia last year (Levinson, 2017). How does educational ethics differ from moral education and educational psychology? How do you see educational ethics fitting in with or overlapping these sub-disciplines?
I think of [ethical theory] as being broad and generalist. I think that educational ethics is distinct from general ethical theory in a few different ways. One is, it is driven by questions within education and about education. Second, is that, much of ethical theory is either explicitly or implicitly, by and about and for adults. We are thinking about how should rational agents behave. Also there’s this assumption that it is fixed. Rational agents with a set of capacities or having a certain set of relationships or with some sort of resources. What should they do, or what should be done on their behalf given this fixed set of features that they have?
But, children are not fully rational or reasonable, nor are adults, but we do pretend that adults are. They certainly don’t have fixed capacities, they are plastic and there’s this recursive aspect to educational ethics. Which is, what we do at one point, may really fundamentally change who the person is, what their resources are, what their capacities are, what they care about or whatever. So, we can’t ever pretend when we do a time slice of this question of educational ethics, that that’s the only time slice that’s relevant. I was talking about that with respect to the cases of Kate and Philip and Frank. That the relationships of assets and deficits that they have in this time slice at this moment that they are engaging in this rock lesson, may be totally different, depending on what happens there, next week. Kate may be better or worse at controlling her emotions. Frank may be more or less able to engage academically, feel confident, interpret written text – whatever.
So that is a feature of educational ethics that has to be central to theorising about educational ethics, that we are dealing with people that are in transition and in development, precisely because education itself is a developmental enterprise. What is education besides development and transformation?
There’s no way of getting around that in education, for children or adults, by definition, because if it’s not generating some kind of growth, then what are you doing?
Yes, if education is about learning and learning and development are very closely linked … you just aren’t educating if the person hasn’t changed in some way. If we were to take this feature of educational ethics quite seriously, it would also make sense to apply some of those to ethics more generally, because we are not all rational and reasonable as adults. Because, as adults, we are in development, so many of these features that I say are true for educational ethics, it may be, we should also take more seriously for general ethics. At least at the moment, let’s get them right for educational ethics.
So that’s a second way in which educational ethics I think is different from ethics more generally. One is that it’s driven by questions that arise within and about education. The second is that it assumes very different features about the moral agents within education and the kinds of prospective that need to take that are developmental and recursive and so forth.
Then, with respect to moral education, I think that moral education is one set of topics or questions or issues that you might think about within educational ethics. Educational ethics is also asking questions about school funding, about discipline policies, about curricular content, about provision of schools, about teacher evaluations. About all sorts of questions, only a sub-set of which are about moral education.
Could you describe what motivates how you develop your resources and the kinds of products that you create to tackle these issues?
So there are two things that we’ve been doing. One is that we’ve started creating these White Papers on unethical practices in schools. As you know, the vast majority of my work in educational ethics is around dilemmas, places where it’s really unclear what the right thing is to do, to try and create tools. These normative case studies enable people to have conversations around hard ethical problems. Oftentimes when I talk about educational ethics to people they get really excited and they say, oh terrific, you can establish ways of giving schools or districts gold stars.
People say that to you?
All the time. There’s so much enthusiasm about the idea of being able to rate schools or districts at their policies ethically and telling people what they should be doing.
Gold stars – it would never have occurred to me.
In fact, as you know, I’m interested in the history of bio-ethics as a model for this. What happened in bio-ethics was something very similar. Bio-ethics started out, both as a response to unethical practices and research and in response to hard ethical problems. Those who started the field of bio-ethics were more interested in the hard ethical problems, but then, at least in the United States, the Government came to them and said, we can’t keep giving you money just to say that things are really complicated. You have to be able to give policymakers guidance as to what is ethical and what is not ethical. Philanthropists started saying this to them too – we are going to give you money if you can give people action guiding work, but, it’s not action guiding to say, things are really complicated.
I was resistant to the unethical practices step for a while because I just didn’t find it very interesting. But, we’re considering practices that are widespread in schools and also patently unethical. We have two White Papers but have not yet publicly released them [on the Justice in Schools Network website]. One is on punishing children and fining families for being truant from school. Part of the interesting thing is, we actually have very little ethical analysis because nothing is needed ethically. Once you work your way through what we know about the policy and the research, it is patently unethical.
We also have one on lunch shaming. There are various things that happen to kids who can’t pay for lunch: from denial of lunch, to taking away their hot lunch and giving them just a plain cheese sandwich. To a stamp on their hand that says, I need lunch money. To making them work off their lunch by helping to clear up the cafeteria. All sorts of things which are clearly just unethical.
These are things on the list of obviously unethical practice that for some reason are very widely spread. Our White Papers are one set of ways in which we are trying to respond to children’s vulnerability and to say – if we take ethical consideration seriously, we should not be standing for this.
The other thing is to help educators and policymakers and students develop agency. That’s part of what we were doing through developing the Youth in Front website, when students started engaging in much more public and widespread activism following the shooting in Parkland Florida in February 2018. There were lots of kids who actually had been engaged in the anti-gun activism for years before that, but because they were low-income kids of colour, it had not got the same kind of national attention as the kids in Parkland got. We recognised that a lot of educators and policymakers were really unsure of how they should be responding, how they could be responding. Especially when there was democratic contestation over what’s appropriate and how to keep kids safe.
I had a former student of mine calling me and saying; I’m a Principal in Los Angeles of a school and I have a lot of kids walking out. The parents are a little concerned because many of our students or their families are undocumented so they were worried about the consequences. That’s what led us to research and write the case study about school walkouts that we put on our website for Trump’s Inauguration day. Once the school walkouts started around gun control, suddenly that case study became very useful.
Then Justin Reich at MIT sent me an email, saying, we are interested in creating a resource. Their idea was students initially, who were thinking about planning civil action related to gun rights or gun control, etcetera. I thought teachers are going to be more likely the ones to use this. We agreed to do students and teachers. Then it was quite amazing, we pulled the normative case study together in 3 weeks and then got phenomenal youth and adult allies to be willing to go on camera and be videotaped about it. A hundred volunteers from Harvard and MIT and elsewhere came for a create-a-thon to pull together resources. Ultimately, we would like to turn it into an online course around youth civic action and the ways in which teachers and school leaders can, should and should not appropriately support student activism.
You have also written about the importance of democracy and its relationship to education. By this, do you mean the democratic purposes of education, participating in democratic practices in schools or youth activism?
All three and this relates to what I talk about in respect to educating in a democracy and for democracy. I think that when we educate for democracy, it’s partly an expression of the values that schools are supposed to be enacting and teaching for. They should be teaching kids to develop the skills, knowledge and disposition to be good civic actors in a democracy. Which then, needs to include giving them space to engage in activism because the way that we learn to do something and the way that we develop an identity as the kind of person who does X is to do it. So there’s a reason that when we teach math, we have kids do math, a lot of math – badly often and then we help them do it better. They really struggle with it and we support them through their struggle and then they start to do it well and so forth. We do that every single year of school, and that’s true of English, we have them read every day, we have them write. We have them do the thing that it is that we are hoping that they learn. Weirdly, with respect to civics and citizenship, we actually mostly have them learn about other people doing the thing.
Because doing the thing, is doing it. It is enacting. There’s a fear of students actually ‘doing’ choice, it’s not the same as just doing math.
Yes, but if we want to prepare citizens, whether they are legal citizens or residents. But, if we want to prepare people who have civic rights and responsibilities which every single child will have, then we have to have them practice exercising those civil rights and responsibilities. Because, there’s no reason to think that they will sort of magically gain the capacity to exercise civic rights and responsibilities if they’ve never been asked to practice them. Any more than there’s reasons to think that they will magically master the quadratic formula or whatever, if they have not been asked actually to use it and apply it. Every school has real challenges that kids care about – right? It’s also true that kids could be applying it to real political and civic problems outside the school. One of the things that would happen if we did that, if we had kids engaged in civic action outside the school is they would actually develop the capacity to be contributors to society much earlier than we allow them to be.
First of all, historically, children were contributing to family and communal life by the time they were four or five, sometimes three. There’s real power in that – children like that. It is not just, say, toddlers and pre-schoolers imitate what they see around them …
They demand it.
Right, they demand it and they value being experienced as contributing people. They’re slow, they’re incompetent …
The story of parenting …
Right, you think, oh my gosh I could just wipe off that table and we would be done. I could clean up your room in 2 minutes and it has taken you 45 minutes to pick up six toys off your floor and put them away. But, there’s a reason we have them do that. They experience being contributors and then over time, they then start really to be contributors, much younger than if we were picking their toys up off the floor all the time.
But right now, we see children as being needy and we treat kids in schools as being these huge resource draws. But they could actually be contributing to our shared life as a community so much earlier if we would let them do civic action. That is the way to help them develop identities as citizens in the same way that doing maths is the way to help them develop identities as mathematicians. Or having them play soccer is the way to help them develop skills and identities as soccer players. So this is something that it is so bizarre that our approach to civic learning is, you are going to read about how other people do civics. You are going to read about how other people make laws. You are going to read about how other people have fought against injustice. We just don’t do that in any other field and we shouldn’t be doing that in civics and learning in action either.
I think sometimes you are lucky in Australia if you even do that. That’s a good education in Australia, you get through high school and it barely has a mention. You are talking about a school system that still cares about the democratic purpose of an education, to even ask that question. What about an education where democratic purposes are under threat or have been completely exchanged for economic purposes?
I think that is a real concern around the world. When we have the economic value of education elevated so much more frequently over the democratic value of education. I do hope maybe, that there’s starting to be a recognition that say, economic inequality has democratic and political consequences that are concerning. As there’s a rise in xenophobic popularism and nationalism that actually threatens the world order in some fundamental ways and in ways that arguably put us all at threat.
I think there’s a burgeoning awareness that both the civic and democratic purposes of schools may need to be recovered. But also, even that a world organised by extreme wealth and poverty may result in making us all much more vulnerable than we would like to be. Even those of us who right now are on the privileged side of the wealth and income gap. So maybe that will help us rediscover the democratic purposes of schools. But yes, unfortunately in the past 50 years, we really have shifted globally to an economic rationale for schooling and lost much of the civic and ethical rationale for schools.
What potential do you see in using the normative case studies with the commentaries that you exemplify in your books, co-edited with Jacob Fay to address the problem of moral disagreement? Could you please comment on the dominance of Western ethics over marginalised Indigenous moral codes? How do we go about having those kinds of conversations, when maybe the registers or the valences are quite different?
That’s a great question and one that I kind of hope that your work is going to reveal its support better than thus far my work has. I think there are at least two different issues going on there. One is about the cases that we select and how we frame those and that gets back to the conversation we were actually having about the interview that you conducted with the Principal. Who gets to frame the questions that are at stake and to say this is a question worth thinking and talking about. This is a question that there are legitimately divergent views about.
We try in our books and in the other cases that we develop to seek out cases from many different places and many different perspectives. We try to do that in a whole different variety of ways that I can talk about but I won’t go on about right now. But ultimately, we are in some ways arbiters, right, of whether or not we think there’s a case there. I had in fact, disagreements with my students and others about whether or not what they were talking about was a case. There is a question when we write up – no case comes to you, handed over and in final form. We are writing, we are packaging. Even for the cases that we are not writing up as cases but are simply presenting as a set of authentic objects. Links to news articles, videos made by students, court cases, objects, documents, whatever. We are curating that and that’s always true in the academic and intellectual contexts; when you construct history you are an author who is making decisions.
So even if somebody comes to us with a particular way of knowing, to present a case to us that we recognise as a case and try to present as a case, we are ultimately then filtering that through our own ways of knowing and our own understandings. That will make it different from what the person is potentially presenting to us. Then, with respect to the commentaries and the interpretation of the case, in some ways it’s easier and in some ways it’s harder to be open to say, Indigenous ways of knowing. It’s easier, because we can invite people who we think possess those Indigenous ways of knowing to write commentaries.
In our forthcoming book, Democratic Discord in Schools (Levinson and Fay, 2019), we were quite careful to make sure that we had at least one commentator who could speak directly of the experiences of those being written about in the case. So in our case, where we have a group of high-school teachers debating whether or not to have transgender bathroom access in schools be a debate topic for their 10th graders, we have a transgender scholar, an activist who has written one of the case commentaries. This is one reason we are so excited to have Daniella Forster, Margot Ford and Kevin Lowe write your case around racially aware real school curriculum (Ford, Forster and Lowe, 2019). You connect it in fact to cases in Australia and write specifically about Aboriginal history in curriculum and we also have commentators who can write about experiences of African Americans teaching in school.
We ensure we have Indigenous voices from the field and I’m using Indigenous differently for meaning – Aboriginal Indigenous. There’s always a tension around being tokenistic. So that was one reason why in the first book, we made sure to have two philosophers, two practitioners or policymakers and two social scientists.
Like Noah’s Ark. A representation of different disciplinary perspectives.
Exactly right, so there was never the risk that somebody could then say, oh well this is what the philosopher would say. They could see that the philosophers disagreed with one and another. Or, this is what the teacher would say, because they could see the teachers disagreed with one and another. With this new book, we haven’t been quite as Noah’s Ark like, two by two by two, because we also then wanted to have a broader array of disciplines and professions and backgrounds. Just as there’s the risk of essentialising or tokenising Indigenous voices, there’s also the risk of essentialising or tokenising the teacher voice or the anthropologist voice or the policymaker’s voice.
Your remedy is to diversify.
Our remedy is to diversify especially across the cases. You know, there is always this trade-off. Already, six commentaries are 1500 words each and it’s a lot to get through and it’s hard for students and so teacher educators may not assign it. In our most recent book, we also had student voices and we experimented with that in two different ways. One case, the school walkout case, has four students who wrote a commentary together with the guidance of their school Principal. But, with the digital surveillance case, we actually invited middle- and high-school students to write micro-commentaries of 250–300 words. So we have six of those micro-commentaries, so you get very different student voices. Which I think it’s great, but it’s also kind of overwhelming because now for that case we have 12 or 13 different views. We have the student views and then we have one of somebody who does digital civic activism.
It’s a balance between offering diversity and being totally overwhelming. We hope to model that there are many different people with many different views and you should never assume that any one person with any one view could stand in for the whole.
Then coupled with your set of discussion protocols, it creates an environment where people can engage with the set of diverse views, in a systematic way. Is that part of your strategy too?
Yes. Partly it is to engage with those diverse views in a systematic way, but also then to bring their own voices into the conversation. To say, sure we have these different perspectives that may come up in the case and we have different perspectives that may come up in the commentary. But then, you too, may have insight and perspective and you too can tell your story about how this case makes you think about the conversation you had with the parent who raised the objection about the whole school barbecue a few weeks ago. You can say, oh my gosh, this really has so many resonances for something that came up with me when I had a student who talked about boat people. I’ve got refugee students who were objecting to that. It’s a way of providing access to diverse voices, but then also modelling our voices too, as people who are using the cases and commentaries need to be part of the conversation too.
That’s a really nice place to end, that we are all part of the conversation. Thanks so much, Meira!
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support for the Educational Ethics: Dilemmas of Diversity Network which funded Professor Levinson’s visit was received from the Faculty of Education and Arts Strategic Network and Pilot Projects Scheme at the University of Newcastle, Australia in 2018.