ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a second approach, relational ethics, specifically an ethic of care and relational pedagogy. One of those approaches an ethic of social justice. Relational ethics and relational pedagogy are based in the centrality of the human relation to the experience of teaching and learning; in what happens between two people, in this case teacher and student; and how their interactions reinforce mutual support, understanding, and growth. One way to create ethical public spaces that does not require the imposition of some group's private ethics onto everyone else is to engage in public deliberation over the question of whether or not the public space meets the basic tests of relations-based ethics. No one need give up their personal, private ethics to agree that failure to provide safe and nurturing spaces to the youth of the nation is unethical: to demand that any policy, any reform movement, that undercuts this fundamental moral requisite cannot be permitted in a democratic society.
