Nel Noddings

Academic, educator, feminist, philosopher, writer

• Born: January 19, 1929
• Place of Birth: Irvington, New Jersey
• Died: August 25, 2022
• Place of Death: Key Largo, Florida

Education: Montclair State College; Rutgers University; Stanford University

Significance: Nel Noddings was an American academic and writer. She spent nearly two decades teaching in the New Jersey public school system before she became a professor at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her research focused on philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. She wrote numerous articles and several books about these subjects and more.

Background

Nel Noddings was born Nel Rieth on January 19, 1929, in Irvington, New Jersey. She grew up with one sister in the Bloomfield area, where she attended what she called a progressive school that focused on the arts and did not give homework. That experience changed when the family moved to the Raritan Bay area when Noddings was in middle school. There she attended a very small school for the next two years before entering high school. This did not deter her from loving to learn, however, and she cited algebra and Latin as two of her favorite subjects in school. She wanted to become a teacher from a young age but was also interested in psychiatry and read much of Sigmund Freud's work. Noddings became the first person in her family to graduate from high school and attend college.

Noddings attended Montclair State College, where she received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1949. Afterward, Noddings pursued a teaching career. She was trained as a math teacher, but her first job was teaching sixth grade in Woodbury, New Jersey. Noddings married and started a family, and in the years that followed, she continued teaching at the middle and high school levels at New Jersey public schools.

In 1964, she received a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She continued to teach and became interested in education as it relates to philosophy, citing her own experiences with learning as a child as an influence. Noddings then began researching educational theory and philosophy, and she even thought about changing the focus of her doctorate research. Noddings received a doctorate in education from Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1973.

Life's Work

In 1973, Noddings began to teach in higher education, taking a job as an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania. Around 1975, she moved to Chicago, Illinois, to become the director of pre-collegiate education at the University of Chicago. She began her career with Stanford University in 1977. During her time there, she served as a faculty member and in other positions such as acting dean of the School of Education. She was the Lee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education from 1992 until 1998. She retired from Stanford in 1998 and then taught philosophy of education at Columbia University. She also held professorships at Colgate University and the University of Southern Maine.

During her academic career, Noddings continued her research on philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. She began writing articles and books on this research, publishing her first book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, in 1984. She centered much of her research on caring as the basis for ethical decision-making. She also incorporated her feminist views when explaining the caring parties (the person caring and the person cared for) and the obligations they both are required to meet in a relationship.

She wrote about her own brand of feminism in her next work, Women and Evil (1989). Noddings then changed her focus to education and ways she felt that education could be improved. She continued to tie some of her feminist beliefs to her educational theories. She published Philosophy of Education (1995), Educating Moral People (2002), and Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Should Teach (2006). While she remained retired in the 2010s, Noddings continued to lecture and teach periodically as an emeritus professor at Stanford. She also continued to write, publishing The Maternal Factor: Two Paths to Morality (2010); Education and Democracy in the 21st Century (2013); and A Richer, Brighter Vision for American High Schools (2015).

Impact

As an educator, Noddings influenced the lives of numerous students, many of whom she mentored and kept in touch with throughout the years. Some even playfully referred to themselves as her "children." As a writer of more than one dozen books, she focused on subjects such as philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics. She also authored more than two hundred articles on a range of educational subjects. Noddings received many awards, including three for teaching excellence from Stanford University, the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service from Columbia University, and the Distinguished Leadership in Education from Rutgers University. She also received several honorary degrees.

Personal Life

She married James A. Noddings, whom she met when they were in high school. They had five children and then adopted five more. The family enjoyed traveling and visited forty-eight of the fifty US states. Despite her busy professional life, Noddings admitted that she was "incurably domestic" and enjoyed taking care of her family and others. She also confessed to allowing her children to take time off from school so they could pursue other interests as long as they did not miss exams or bring home bad grades. Noddings and her husband were avid gardeners. James A. Noddings died in 2012 and Noddings herself died in 2022, at the age of ninety-three.

Bibliography

"Nel Noddings."Arizona State University, insidetheacademy.asu.edu/nel-noddings. Accessed 19 May 2017.

"Nel Noddings Interview Transcript." Arizona State University, 2012, insidetheacademy.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Transcript-Noddings.pdf. Accessed 19 May 2017.

"Nel Noddings, the Ethics of Care and Education." Infed.org, infed.org/mobi/nel-noddings-the-ethics-of-care-and-education. Accessed 19 May 2017.

"Noddings (née Rieth), Nel." Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Edited by Stuart Brown, et al., Routledge, 1997, p. 577.

O'Toole, Kathleen. "What Matters to Nel Noddings and Why." Stanford Report, 4 Feb. 1998, news.stanford.edu/news/1998/february4/noddings.html. Accessed 19 May 2017.