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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
The essay argues that resources in Scripture, tradition, and social theory are important but insufficient to the task of teaching social ethics. Liberation ethics promotes not only diverse epistemologies to evaluate the structures that mediate social relations, but also moral courage to execute social responsibility. Given this agenda, teaching social ethics also requires community-based learning experiences, democratic classrooms, and the social commitment of the academy. Drawing on student writing and the example of the author's own academic institution, the essay argues that multiple resources and sites are needed to educate students in ethical theory and moral courage.
1 Weisberg, Jacob, “United Shareholders of America,” The New York Times Magazine, 25 01 1998, 29–32.Google Scholar
2 I find this appropriation of the American dream also to be true of some of the relatively few students I teach who come from working-class/working-poor families. Most of these students, however, are already critical of the race- and gender-stratified class society in the U.S., and use courses like mine to help them better analyze structures with which they are already too familiar. Most of these students eschew direct service work in the course and seek out groups involved in social change, like community and labor organizing.
3 Parks, Sharon Daloz, “Social Vision and Moral Courage: Mentoring a New Generation,” Cross Currents 40/3 (Fall 1990): 350–67.Google Scholar
4 I am grateful to the students in my social ethics classes whose wisdom and insight made this essay possible. I also wish to thank Carolyn Howe and a blind reviewer of this essay for suggestions on an earlier version.
5 The following description of ways to look at the relationship between community-based learning and the classroom were evident in a workshop on Service Learning offered by the Maine Campus Compact at the University of New England on August 22-24, 1997. I am grateful to Carolyn Howe who attended with me for important suggestions about ways to look at this relationship. For a brief but representative bibliography on Service Learning see Marullo, Sam, “The Service Learning Movement in Higher Education: An Academic Response to Troubled Times,” The Sociological Imagination 33/2 (1996): 134–37.Google Scholar
6 Marullo, , “The Service Learning Movement in Higher Education,” 123.Google Scholar
7 This model of academic-community collaboration is especially appropriate if the academy is a Jesuit institution. In 1995, the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus mandated that each Jesuit college and university work for justice in one or more of the following ways: 1) direct service accompanying the poor; 2) developing knowledge of the demands of justice and the social response required to achieve it; 3) participation in community mobilization for the creation of a more just social order (General Congregation, 1995: 7). See Marullo, , “The Service Learning Movement in Higher Education, 126.Google Scholar
8 Bounds, Elizabeth M., “Three-Ring Circus at a Combustible Crossroads: Teaching Religion as Core Curriculum,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/4 (Winter 1997): 797.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 See Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);Google ScholarPolanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958);Google ScholarHarding, Sandra, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
10 O'Neil, Maura, “Interconnectedness of Scholarship and Pedagogy,” Bulletin/Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 24/2 (04 1995): 27–28.Google Scholar
11 Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck, “Resisting Reality,” Spotlight on Teaching 2 (09 1994): 2.Google Scholar
12 Palmer, Parker J., “Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing,” Change 19/5 (09/10 1987): 20–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Ackerman, Robert John, Heterogeneities: Race, Gender, Class, Nation and State (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996): 193–95.Google Scholar
14 Keith Morton, “The History of Service Learning,” address to a conference on Service Learning on August 22, 1997 offered by Maine Campus Compact at the University of New England.
15 The following excerpts from student writings are selected from papers submitted in my social ethics classes during the academic year 1997-98.
16 Young, Iris Marion, “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3/3 (1997): 360.Google Scholar
17 Palmer, , “Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing,” 25.Google Scholar
18 Jakobsen, Janet R., “The Body Politic v. Lesbian Bodies: Publics, Counter-Publics and the Uses of Norms,” 1997, unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
19 This process will involve changing not only individual classroom dynamics but larger structural dynamics in the academy at large which are beyond the scope of this paper. For initial reflections on ways to resist conventional pedagogy in order to create classrooms of teachers and learners see bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar
20 Conversation with Judith Butler at the annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics, Atlanta, GA, January 1998.
21 Parks, , “Social Vision and Moral Courage,” 357.Google Scholar