After a seminar group discussion in our class last night, I was excited to return to my blog to add comments and thoughts to my post about the North Vancouver Students Learning from their teacher's efforts in Nicarauga. This blog will include parts of our discussion from chapter four of Ethics and Politics in Early Childhood Education (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005). Our discussion focused on acting with ethical practice and acting with ethical intent, particularly in response to the following quotes from Gunilla Dalberg:
"Putting everything which one encounters into pre-made categories implies that we make the Other into the Same, as everything which does not fit into these categories, which is unfamiliar and not taken-for-granted has to be overcome...To think of an other whom I cannot grasp is an important shift as it challenges the very practices of our pedagogy. It poses important questions to us as pedagogues. Questions such as how the encounter with Otherness, with difference, can take place as responsibly as possible..." (2005, p.86)
In our group dialogue, we examined what we understood as our responsibility in encounter with the Other. We discussed our own feelings about what it means to "help those in need" and how it feels to be an individual who has gone to "aid those who are poor". We questioned whether or not it is "Othering" if one has ethical intent when giving money or time to aid fellow humans. If we consider why we are giving and who we are effecting with that aid, are we not being as ethical as we can be at the time? We felt the importance of learning from an encounter, when one still graples to understand what changed from it also shows a sense of ethical thought and intent. Thinking of ethics as Bauman says "with its ambivalence and messiness"
(2005,p. 89).
After this discussion, I feel deeply that the teacher I presented is extremely ethical as a person and teacher. Marley Haller goes to Nicarauga each summer to live with the people she feels are her extended family. She does not go for religous reasons, public recognition or because she feels they need her; she goes because these are people she truly loves and wants to spend time with. In turn, the families and children she "encounters" have a relationship of trust and caring with Marley. Hearing how she relates her time in Nicarauga to life in Canada does not create a negative divide between Us and Them by assuming to know what living in poverty feels like. Her desire is for the children in her classes to learn to respect different cultures and not to make assumptions about what they see in pictures and newspapers about poverty(a lesson many adult have never learned). I see Haler'sCanadian students building on their knowledge of what poverty is and learning how to discuss it and respond to it respectfully, with thought and intention. Does this not relate directly to Sevenhuijsen's statement: "Acting ethically is based on interaction with and attentiveness to others, not derived from an ethical code."? (1998: 64)
The last thing our group attempted to make sense of was the subjectivity of the langauge of ethics. As we all stand in different discourses with different biases, it is difficult not to judge or feel judged when talking about situations or events that we are emotionally attached to. We cannot know what the other is feeling or thinking; therefore, we must trust that those listening are doing with the ethical intent of learning or knowing us better. When discussing poverty and work I have done to help people who require assistance, I am sensitive to how other people view and comment on my work. I am also in a place of problematizing some of the work I have done in my past employment. Has it been imposed on people with the assumption that they need help. How can I listen better to the voices of those who need help? Who decides that someone needs help and how do they make that decision? Therefore, I challenge myself over the next few weeks to remind myself to listen carefully in my interactions; through more thoughtful listening I can only make better desisions and choices in my encounters with families. I will also be honest about my biases and try to think without allowing them to cloud my judgement; with greater awareness of my personal biases I will consider the other more carefully and be a more genuine citizen, caregiver and educator.
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