The necessity of a relational ethics alongside Noddings’ ethics of care in narrative inquiry

Introduction

At an annual research meeting of the American Educational Research Association, several presenters mentioned relational ethics in a symposium that connects narrative inquiry with indigenous scholarship. While an idea of relational ethics flows in and through the symposium, there is no explicit definition, no definitive idea of what is meant. When an audience member raises her hand and asks ‘How is relational ethics different from Nel Noddings ethics of care’, there is minimal discussion before questions closer to the main focus of the symposium are raised.

The question, though, stays with us as we begin to write more about relational ethics in narrative inquiry (Clandinin et al., 2018). It is this wonder about how relational ethics connects with an ethics of care (Noddings, 1984) in narrative inquiry that we take up here.

Starting research relationships: setting up an art club as research site

We were grateful to be given a space inside the junior high school where our research was situated and we could meet for our after school art club with youth. At first sight, the classroom that would be our research home for the next 2 years in the school looked cold and uninviting. The room, currently used mostly for storage purposes, was a barren space with rectangular tables piled to the side and small desks in rows. Old wooden cupboards lined the walls. The classroom space was located at the far end of a long hallway.

As our research team tried to envision the conversations and activities we hoped to engage in with youth, we knew we needed to create a more inviting space. We imagined what youth might like and began to move the furniture. We first joined tables together. To one side, we created a large sharing area with a circle of chairs, intentionally creating this arrangement to invite youth to sit together, perhaps share stories, with each other, and with us. We carefully set up a display of books and different artifacts including multimedia for the youth to touch and explore. To greet them as they walked in, we filled a table with snack food and small juice boxes. We imagined they would be hungry right after school.

Even as we organized all this, we did not know how many youth would come. Or even if they would come at all. Feeling nervous, all we could do was wait and hope. The dismissal bell finally rang. Our team scattered. Some waited in the hallway, some held signs, some smiled as they stood by the door entrance. Slowly youth began to enter the classroom. (Interim research text based on field notes, 6 October 2010).

As we revisited the field notes made on the first day of the art club which was part of a 3-year narrative inquiry with indigenous youth and their families to explore their educational experiences both in and out of school, we recollect our emotions, our sense of purpose, our actions. We did not know the classroom and school, although the school structure with long hallways with classrooms opening to each side was familiar from our years of being students and, for some of us, being teachers. The hallways between the classrooms were filled with lockers, one for each student. School bells signalled transitions.

We knew we wanted to create something different than what we found in the classroom to which we were assigned. We knew that what we could, and would, work from, was an ethics of care. Our research team tried to create an inviting and warm space where we could show (and prove, we hoped, with time) ourselves as being carers; where the youth would know and feel that we genuinely cared about, and cared for, them and that we were curious about their experiences. Building relationships from an ethics of care was our starting place.

The art club was a central part of our narrative inquiry into the school experiences of Indigenous youth and their families. The art club was a place where we could come to meet youth and build relationships. These relationships were also sustained outside of the art club, relationships that also included family members, sometimes parents, or grandparents, and at other times friends, siblings, or extended family. Our intentions were to, over time, come to learn more about the educative experiences of Indigenous youth in their schools, homes and communities.

Continuing to live an ethics of care: faltering in our inquiry focus

The relationships we were building were caring ones. The youth wanted to come, explore, and participate in the diverse creative activities we set out for them. But we wondered if establishing caring relationships in which we worked as ‘carers’ was enough to allow an inquiry focus. Sometimes we wondered if the youth thought we were entertaining them – there were times where it seemed that we were, indeed, doing this. Sometimes we worried we had not included appropriate activities for each youth and questioned whether we needed more games, different reading material, or different creative activities. Perhaps some of us were expressing our embodied knowledge in our caring actions that were called forth in the classroom place where the art club was situated. Embodied personal practical knowledge called forth practices of laying out materials of our choosing and of designing activities that we assumed would be educative for the youth began to be part of what was happening. We asked youth to remove their hats, to speak respectfully as we tried to model respect. A sense of moral education was seeping in.

We wondered how to move further into the kinds of relationships that would lead us to mutual inquiry, the kind of narrative inquiry that we had proposed. As researchers, we began to feel unease with the ways an ethics of care positioned us as carers and as teachers. We knew that Noddings did not intend that the roles of carer and cared for were fixed categories. And yet even with that knowledge we felt there was something missing in what we were doing. We were puzzled.

Our research team began to have conversations to try to name what was puzzling us. We decided we had to live in a less certain way in the club with the youth, in ways that would help us live with the uncertainty of not knowing which way things would go. As we gradually allowed ourselves to be less planned and less certain, youth began to bring us to what they wanted to do. We slowly began to engage in different ways, ways that could be described as more educative. We recognized that we needed to be more open to uncertainty and mutuality, leaving spaces for co-composing of the inquiry. In order for inquiry to happen we, as researchers, had to shift to allowing ourselves to live in liminal spaces in order to learn something. And in doing so ‘openings and possibilities within ourselves and between relationships took root’ (Clandinin et al., 2018: 193). Coming to an understanding of the necessity of being wakeful and of the necessity to engage with a sense of uncertainty, we were beginning to pay closer attention to what we call a relational ethics for narrative inquiry (Clandinin et al., 2018).

Blustery day: living an ethics of care in narrative inquiry

In thinking about what a focus on an ethics of care offered us, we turn to a moment that stayed with us, a moment we have returned to often in our conversations as we try to make sense of who we were and how we lived with each other and the youth within this particular study.

It is a snowy blustery winter day in mid-December. Vera, Jean and other researchers watch as weather warnings and highway closure notices appear on our university e-mail. It is an unusually stormy day. Unknown to each other, we are each listening to the weather reports alone in our offices. It is only when our uncertainties rise that we begin to send text messages and make phone calls to each other. ‘Are you going to the art club? I think it is important to go’, ‘Yes, I can make it. I have snow tires. Do you want a ride?’ When someone suggests that we do not go, others rapidly respond. ‘No, we must go. We need to make sure we are there’. Four of us arrive for club time and, as the after school bell rings, the youth arrive, hungry, looking for us, and eager to begin to engage what they might be able to do in the art club. As we set up the art club that afternoon, we also watch the snow accumulate and with it a sense of worry about the road conditions and how the youth, and we, would get home.

Late that snowy afternoon after some youth had gone home on buses and others had trudged home through a winter blizzard, we sat and said to each other, ‘It was important that we came’. We said no more at the time. We gathered our supplies, put things away so the classroom would be ready for other activities during the next school day and headed out into the slowly closing down city. (Interim research text on field notes, 15 December 2010).

Amid this winter snow storm we drove slowly and carefully to our research site. Leaving much earlier than usual, we wanted to be there to greet the youth. On this snowy December day, we had been in the art club for almost three months. Since our September starting point, youth had been coming. When we began the art club we knew that we needed to hold firm to our commitment to holding open this place for youth who wanted to come. We saw our commitment as part of an ethics of care, calling us to Noddings’ words that ‘an ethic of caring locates morality primarily in the pre-act consciousness of the one caring’ (1984: 29). As a group of researchers we knew the pressures of other things interfering, distracting us from the commitment we had made to youth and their lives, and the commitments we had made to the school. Working from, and with, an ethics of care meant that we were committed to being present with the youth each week.

Within the school, we, at times, felt watched and we knew the art club was storied in particular ways. Some of the school stories that circulated in words and in actions were that the art club was seen as just a place where some kids sometimes came, where there were no set learning outcomes, where there was no accountability measures in place. For us as researchers, the art club was about the relationships we had been engaged in with youth, Elders, and each other. The art club held memories of particular moments, such as the day of the snow storm. Attending to the art club called forth notions of care for us.

While we saw our response to being present even in a serious snow storm was part of living out an ethics of care, we realized that something else was also guiding our actions. As we inquired into that stormy day, a day that occurred after several months of getting together with the youth, we were struck by the fact that they too showed up despite the unrelenting and blinding snow. Were youth turning up on such a day because they wanted to come to a place to do art, a place where there were ‘nice’ people, and a place where there were snacks? Was there also a growing sense of commitment in relation to the inquiry we were beginning to negotiate with them? Were the youth beginning to feel a part of something with us? Did the idea of composing an inquiry together call forth a different sense of responsibility from them as well as from us? Was coming together in a narrative inquiry calling forth a sense of mutuality in the relationship shaping their choice to come to the art club despite the ever darkening afternoon? Might our relationship with the youth be thickening, as ‘caring for’ was layered with the ‘growing with’ in a narrative inquiry relationship?

Continuing to live an ethics of care: learning to live a relational ethics

Nobody was at the club yet. I [Simmee] was glad that it was only 1:00 pm so I had some time before the club started. With all the noise in my mind, it was nice to be in a quiet, comforting place. It had only been a week since my friend died. Not only did we teach together, she was one of my closest friends. Her death was so sudden and tragic; I was still trying to make sense of it.

I must have been daydreaming when I saw a familiar face and a blonde ponytail peeking through the door; it was Bryann, a youth that came to the art club and who was a participant in my doctoral study. When she saw me, her lips turned up ever so slightly at the corners. With a little smile, she entered the room. She quietly sat down beside me. I knew something was wrong. I saw the same look that Bryann had whenever she shared a story about something in her life that made her sad; these stories often led to tears. By now it was about 1:45 pm and the club would not start until 2:30 pm I knew from Bryann’s friend, another participant in the club, that she had been absent from school for a week. I also knew today was her first day back at school but I did not ask why she was not in class. Instead I said, ‘We missed you last week, Bryann’, Bryann explained how she was at her six year old cousin’s wake held on the reserve. ‘He was bleeding and dying in his hospital bed’, Bryann started to share fragments of her experience and, by the end of Bryann’s story, we were both crying. I shared my sadness of losing my friend.

After a quiet moment Bryann quietly said: ‘My teachers don’t know why I was gone. They probably think I am just skipping school. It doesn’t matter because my teachers don’t know anything about my personal life anyway … I know I should be in drama class, but I can’t concentrate.’ I said, ‘Usually there is no one here this early. How did you know the door would be open’, Bryann responded, ‘I took a chance’,

She said if she had not come to the club space, she would have roamed the hallways, hid in the bathroom, or maybe left the school grounds. We continued to talk until one of the other researchers arrived. Then Bryann got up and announced that she was going back to class. Before leaving she assured me that she would be back for the club. (Field notes, April 13, 2011) (Chung, 2016)

In this moment we understood that Bryann and Simmee were both filled with sadness and uncertainty in their lives. They were both struggling to compose some narrative coherence as they struggled with the deaths of people close to them.

Both Simmee and Bryann arrived early in a familiar place, the room where our art club met. Simmee came seeking time to be in a ‘quiet and comforting’ place. Bryann said she took a chance that Simmee might be there. The impromptu meeting was not planned. Simmee’s response to Bryann’s arrival was to abandon her ‘alone time’ and to listen closely to Bryann. In her response she embodied a deepening sense of commitment to Bryann and their relationship. In their coming together, they shared their stories of loss as they came alongside each other and listened. This meeting was part of a slow six month process of becoming part of the narrative inquiry; there had been other conversations (Chung, 2016). With time, and through sustained research conversations both in and outside of the club, they had co-composed a belonging place, with, and for, each other. They were able to see each other’s lives as lives in the making: Simmee knew about Bryann’s most recent absence from school and about how she did not feel her teachers knew much about her life. Although it is not clear in the field notes, Bryann knew that Simmee was engaged and planning to marry and move to a different city at the end of the school year. In the moment described in the field notes, sitting close beside each other at the same table, they invited each other into their worlds outside of the club and outside of school. Simmee invited Bryann into her world lived with her dear friend; Bryann invited Simmee into her world with her cousin and family on the reserve. As they told stories, tears rolled down their faces, tears marking their sadness and loss. In that moment, a moment where they were both present to, and for, each other, their relationship shifted again.

There was growing trust and a sense that they both cared for, and about, each other. But there was more at work. They shifted beyond an ethics of care to a relationship marked by what we are calling relational ethics (Clandinin et al., 2018). We note this shift from an ethics of care to include a relational ethics in the shift to a ‘becoming together’ with responsibility to and for each other. In those moments as Bryann and Simmee sat together shedding tears in the quiet space of the club their relationship of ‘caring for’ one another was moving towards a narrative inquiry relationship of ‘belonging and becoming with’ one another.

As the dimensions of a relational ethics are forefronted first in our experience of the snowy day and later more clearly in the unexpected meeting between Simmee and Bryann, we see the five dimensions of relational ethics reflected. These dimensions include: imagination that calls forth ‘world’- travel (Lugones, 1987) and improvisation; of coming alongside slowly to attend closely to the stories lived, told and not told; of attending to the ongoingness of researchers’ and participants’ lives in motion, attending that is only possible by seeing each moment as within unfolding lives; of co-creating spaces with participants in order to attend to their and our not knowing and liminality; and of bodies in relation within places of stillness, places where we attend to, and with, silence and contemplation (Clandinin et al., 2018).

Living alongside the youth and their families in this narrative inquiry, we continued to live an ethics of care, that is, we continued to see our work as guided by attending to caring for participants, ourselves and by a narrative ontology. We began, however, to see that a different ethics was also at work in the experiences with the youth and each other. We turned again to Noddings who reminded us that an ethics of care is not a dogma to be adhered to with fixed and certain rules. Noddings (2012) wrote that

A great attraction of care ethics, I think, is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. […] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible. (2012: 108–109)

It is in this spirit that we see a relational ethics alongside an ethics of care in our work as narrative inquirers. As we imagine our understanding of relational ethics in narrative inquiry we consider that ‘narrative inquiry is first and foremost a relational research methodology and while it is research it is also a transaction between people which makes ethical issues and concerns about living well with others central to the inquiry’ (Caine et al., 2013: 580). As Clandinin (2007) wrote ‘the challenge for the narrative inquirer therefore is less one of achieving the highest possible grade of epistemic clarity and is instead how to integrate ethical and epistemic concerns […] how to put knowledge in the service of enhancing human experience’ (2007: 46). Simultaneously as we live out an ethics of care which directs us ‘to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible’ (Noddings, 2012: 109), we also live out a relational ethics which directs us to complex dimensions with our research relationships.

A focus on the intentions of an ethics of care

As we began our narrative inquiry by creating a space within a school classroom and bringing in food and activities and structuring the furniture to allow conversations and dialogue, we were intent on showing to youth who might join us that we would care for them as well as care about them. Our intentions were to establish relationships of trust in which we would act as carers, as people who would not harm them but would attend to their lives, to listen to their, and their families’, stories and to respond in positive ways. Our intentions were to be committed to what we had said our research was about and we intended to live in responsible ways alongside them.

By the time of the snowy day in December of our first year with them, we knew we had to go to the school at the appointed time, despite concerns about driving conditions, to live out that ethics of care, to continue to be responsive to their lives in ways that showed our commitments. We were the carers for the youth in our intentions by that moment. We knew we were living in a school context where we might not have been understood as living out an ethics of care. Perhaps the school stories were suggesting that we were ‘using’ the youth for our research purposes without an attentiveness to who they were as people.

As we inquired into what happened on the snowy day we began to see that more was at work. The youth also came. We did not ask why they came but we did wonder why they too stayed after school in the midst of a blinding blizzard marked by real dangers. We wondered if they came because they also cared about us and about how the art club was storied in the school. Were they too feeling the importance of letting those in the school know that they cared about the art club and the researchers who were present in the club? We wondered how their taking on roles as carers was, in part, to maintain the community. Was this day a marker in a shift to more than an ethics of care at work for both the youth and for us as researchers. Was there an expanded commitment to enhancing the community of those who were part of the art club at work?

In the months between the snowy day and the field notes of the moment between Bryann and Simmee, we began to sense a commitment on the part of the youth to the inquiry. They began to story themselves into the narrative inquiry, becoming more active in co-composing activities. We could see that as only methodological but we sense that a different ethics was beginning to be shaped, what we are now calling a relational ethics.

A focus on the intentions of relational ethics

As we continued to work only within an ethics of care, we began to feel that staying with only an ethics of care began to shape us toward moral education rather than toward narrative inquiry. Our concerns stayed bounded within the relationship between carer and cared for. Even though we could see the ways that there was the possibility of shifting who we were in the research relationship, that is, participants and researchers could shift between carer and cared for, we needed to turn toward other ethical considerations to engage in narrative inquiry.

We consider the complex dimensions of a relational ethics as evolving from our initial intent to establish an ethics of care with participants, and then shifting towards our intent to inquire into experiences, where we live alongside participants. In our shift toward co composing narrative inquiry spaces where our explorations find ground, our disposition, attention and responsibility to the dimensions of relational ethics is grounded. As we move to co composing the educative spaces embodied in narrative inquiry that carry the possibilities of retelling and reliving lives (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), we are called to move with an ethics of care into what we are calling relational ethics. As narrative inquirers our disposition to travel to these worlds is intentional. As researchers we are curious and our wonders are shaped and interwoven with the invisible but felt presence of others. As we shift from our orientation to compose caring relations guided by an ethics of care to include an orientation to inquire narratively into the lived and told stories of people’s lives, our ethical stance begins to encompass a relational ethics for narrative inquiry.