Abstract
The semester is winding down and I am not sleeping well. I am a literacy professor and a few students, future teachers, have missed much of the coursework. I worry about these students, many of whom are struggling with extensive caretaking responsibilities. I firmly believe that the content and experiences of a literacy course are needed. Some of these teachers have not engaged enough with class to teach young children to read and write. I seek out many interlocutors, including the students, to conceive of a better grading policy, better understanding of the situation, and a better response. Then a way forward emerges unexpectedly – I hear Barbara Stengel firmly and humbly speaking from her monograph Responsibility: I invite you to shed your habitual reliance on responsibility as accountability and take up the habit of thinking about responsibility (response-ability) as a capacity to be developed in relation. (p. 28)
What would it mean to shed reliance on accountability? What new vistas might responsibility open up and what could responsibility do to help me with these hard questions? In this review, I offer an introduction to what Stengel argues responsibility affords. Then, in keeping with the spirit of Stengel’s project and that of the promising new series of which Stengel’s book is a part, ‘philosophy of education in action’, I conclude with how Stengel’s philosophizing changed my actions going forward.
Stengel writes with sensitivity and concern for the very real, sometimes mundane, and often thorny tensions of practice. Responsibility is no quick fix or adherence to a particular best practice. Instead, responsibility is the right educational anchor in a world in which we know everything and yet we know nothing. That we need an anchor that we are drifting unmoored educationally in the twenty-first century, is part of the argument I make here. (p. 12)
Stengel is well aware that a solid conceptual anchor must be robust and coherent if it is to secure in the actual seas of daily life. There is also risk in anchoring around a term so widely and colloquially used. As Stengel notes, ‘responsibility is not a new term in the lexicon of ethical (and political) thinking’ (p. 29). To define and distinguish, Stengel offers a genealogy and robust philosophical analysis that highlights responsibility’s meaning across place and time. Stengel’s stated intention is not to be fully comprehensive but ‘to provide some signposts convincing enough to confirm for you the shift in meaning and ethical possibility to which I point’ (p. 28). Stengel’s capacity to signpost comes from fluency, a deep familiarity with and robust dive into a canon that includes some usual suspects and culminates in folks like Mary Midgely, Phillipa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Anscombe. This conceptual account alone makes the book a gem as Stengel is an artful reader and writer of philosophy capable of keeping the complexity of an idea while making it accessible.
Yet, a treat of Stengel’s project is that alongside her textual accounting, Stengel conjoins an empirical narrative of how responsibility lives in daily life in schools. To do so, she tells of Bailey Middle School: a school that rapidly went from failing to thriving. Stengel is no spinner of fairy tales and Responsibility sees and describes Bailey in beautiful messiness. In my new favorite account of good teaching, she writes the educators at Bailey succeeded, not because they followed tried-and-true formulas, not because they were obedient to the directives of the district or the state department of education, not because they demonstrated best professional practices, but because they took the time to pay attention to the actual needs of the people in specific circumstances, they prioritized relational realities and collaborative possibilities, they considered multiple options for action, they weighed options in light of shared goals and values, they acted with confidence, and they reconsidered when the results didn’t move them and their students closer to growth. In short, they prioritized response-ability, their own and their students, over accountability to external directives, research findings, and even ‘professional habits’. (p. 8)
Key to this empirical–philosophical project is Stengel’s interplay between a word and context, philosophy and practice. Bailey is not purposed to illustrate a word that Stengel came to through books. Instead, entering the school as a philosopher and teacher educator, being response-able to what she found, she came to responsibility because it helped her better articulate Bailey and studying Bailey and philosophy helped her find additional nuance.
Philosophical inquiry does not provide answers and Stengel stresses this throughout. It does offer ways of thinking with and thinking through complexity, hopefully in the service of living a little bit better. The challenges teachers face, illustrated with the account of Bailey, are daily and often surface in small moments, and yet the stakes are high. As Stengel writes, ‘responsibility is the clarion call of schooling for all who play a role in it’ (p. 13). Responsibility ‘is not about right response, but rather a matter of inviting, welcoming, and enabling the response of the Other’ (p. 13).
Initially as I struggled with grading, I tried to get just the right approach and statement in my syllabus. I obsessed around details like had I exposed students enough to requirements. I wished that I could have done better so they could have done better. Stengel pulled me from that reverie to remind me that the entire grounds on which I was operating – one that focused on accountability and denied messy relationships – was a stumbling block. 1 Her philosophical–empirical dive into responsibility helped me see anew – to head the clarion call. I began speaking with students about responsibilities – mine to them, all of ours to children and curriculum, their responsibilities to themselves, to those in their personal life, to classmates. This lens did not make conversations easy or fun but it did allow hard things to be discussed in the service of being responsible. Stengel’s philosophy took me to new vistas so I could act with more justice. I commend the book as Stengel’s concept and artful philosophical–empirical rendering will similarly anchor other philosophers and educators as they navigate the murky and oft stormy waters of trying to live well with others.