ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss the work of Nel Noddings and the idea of an essentially feminist ethic of care. Nel Noddings has developed an ethic of caring or, to put it in another way, a learned disposition of care, that is central to everything we do as persons. Her designation of an ethic of care is relational and thus is more to do with how we understand and relate to objects, object-relations, object-configurations and people in our worlds. Natural caring, for her, is a moral attitude, a longing for the goodness that comes out of our own experience of being cared for. And in addition, she develops a notion of ethical caring. Acting ethically comprises a dispositional state, which is already there (in some form or another), having been learned, seeking to express itself in the world in relation to a problem in the world that requires some action. Dispositions then have this persistent quality, although they can in time be modified. They have a strong affinity with a person's chosen identity. A notion of identity is a key curriculum concept.
