[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff. 

[00:00:17] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Our guest today is Cara E. Furman. Dr. Furman is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at Hunter College. We last spoke with Cara in July 2022, when she and Cecilia Traugh talked with us about descriptive inquiry in teacher practice. Today, we’ll be talking about Cara’s recently published book, “Teaching from an Ethical Center, Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction.” Welcome, Cara. 

[00:00:43] Cara F: Hi. Good afternoon. Good to see you both.

[00:00:45] Amy H-L: You describe yourself as occupying the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. Why is that the crossroads that you’ve chosen?

[00:00:54] Cara F: That’s an interesting way to put it. I guess I would say that it’s not so much the crossroads that I’ve chosen, but the crossroads where I’ve found myself. I was an undergraduate history major, and I was always drawn at the time to what I didn’t know then to call, but what I now know as philosophy. I was really interested in asking big questions about the historical moments and less interested in the specific things that happened and was also really interested in how people were thinking in a given time period. And again, less exactly around what they were doing apart from those thoughts. And so I majored in history, I graduated, and I thought about all kinds of things, but I found myself working at a preschool at a ski resort. And again, I found myself really captivated with what does it mean to be a young child, what does it mean to find meaning in the work, what does it mean for me as a recent graduate to be finding meaning in the work? 

And I also really wanted to be apart from books in some ways. I wanted to be out in the world doing things, helping people, not just thinking about what it means to do good work, but actually doing good work. So I decided to get a master’s degree in education and I took a lot of wonderful classes during my master’s, which I still draw on. 

But the final class that I took in my program was a philosophy of education class. And I felt like that class, it wasn’t intended to be a capstone, but it felt like a capstone, because suddenly I was taking all of these classes where I was learning the best ways to do things, and I was really thinking about why I was doing it. And so that kind of back and forth has always been key for me. The what matters. Why do we do what we do? Who are we? And then how do we, in the day to day, execute what we’re trying to do? 

[00:03:15] Amy H-L: Your subtitle is Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction. Your book with Cecilia Traugh is titled “Descriptive Inquiry and Teacher Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom to Create Democratic Schools.” Is practical wisdom an expression of the intersection of philosophy and teaching?

[00:03:36] Cara F: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. So, practical wisdom Is a loose translation of what the ancient Greeks, specifically Aristotle, called Phronesis. And the idea in the ancient Greeks, and again, this is a loose translation because a lot doesn’t get taken from the ancient Greeks in the way that I see it. But the idea is that we should know the right way of doing things, and to do so, that means that we have to be clear about what our ethics are and also what our actions are, and that figuring out the right way of doing things according to our ethics matching our actions, that has to happen always in context. And so what works in one situation, and he was thinking about politics largely, but what works in one context doesn’t work perfectly in another one. So practical wisdom, to me, is the best way I have found, and I think Cecilia would say the same thing, to describe the ways that teachers know. And I say it’s a loose translation from Aristotle primarily because Aristotle distinguished between political knowing, which was practical wisdom, and craft knowing. And he put things like medicine and teaching sometimes in the area of craft knowing. I would say that to be a teacher involves actually both thinking about ethics and a deep understanding of craft, and so it’s bringing together those two elements. And so that’s where I sort of differ from Aristotle.

[00:04:47] Amy H-L: But what does that mean, the way that teachers know?

[00:04:51] Cara F: I’m really fascinated with the thinking that goes on as the teacher goes through their daily work. And by that, I think about the daily work with children. And that actually is what interests me the most. Also, the daily work apart from children, all the planning that a teacher does. So any given teacher during the day is faced with thousands and thousands of decisions as they go through their day. And these are ethical decisions in many cases. Whom we call on has import for the effect that it has on children, for example. So an example of a teacher knowing, that I use over and over again and I highlighted in my book, is a pre-K teacher who was required to use a particular curriculum that where they read “Make Way for Ducklings,” which is a great book. It’s a popular classic. The book takes place in Massachusetts, and that’s where the curriculum was also developed. This teacher, though, was using the same curriculum and book in a rural location. And where she was teaching, the kids had no experience with crossing streets, which is a central part of the book. It’s about ducks who are learning how to cross the street, basically. And so, she was required to follow this curriculum to fidelity, meaning that she had to follow it to a script. But she could see that it wasn’t making sense for the children in front of her. And so she knew the book well enough, and she knew the kids well enough, and she also knew her day well enough that she found a part of the day where the kids went outside and they practiced crossing in the parking lot of the school. And they also did an activity called a sound map, which is when you sit very quietly. You listen for about 5 minutes and you note all the sounds that you’re hearing. And then having the children do this, she felt like they now had an experience that could go along with the book. So that’s an example of teacher knowing. She had to know, again, I’ll repeat it because I think it’s so important, she knew curriculum, she knew kids’ developmental needs, she knew the specific kids in front of her, she knew rural locations, she knew urban locations, and she knew how to kind of connect all these things for the children. 

[00:07:00] Jon M: It’s interesting that you mentioned fidelity, because you mentioned that a number of times in the book. Could you talk a little bit about how you see, what you see, fidelity as being, and when it’s useful or important, and when it’s important to know not to follow fidelity? I don’t know if following fidelity is a word or a phrase, but… 

[00:07:21] Cara F: I want to start back with Amy’s an original question, which was why did I choose this crossroads. And I said, I didn’t really choose it, I came to it. But in the area of choice, I think philosophy gives us a way of understanding the world that is extremely important. And science does, too. And so does English. And all these other disciplines have their own lenses. But one of the things that philosophy helps me do is it helps me think about the meaning behind words. And it also helps me unpack things that people take for granted. So fidelity is a word that somehow seems to have taken over in schools in the last 10 years. And by taken over, and seems to, I actually have done a lit review where I tried to figure out exactly when people started using this word and looking for people to who had commented on the use of the word fidelity as it was starting to trickle into educational language. And there’s actually not a huge amount of literature that I was able to find. It arrived and then took over without a lot of fanfare. And where I first began hearing fidelity was from my students, who were saying we have to follow this and this to fidelity. And they were saying it as just a given. It was of course, this is what you do. This is how you teach. So fidelity in classrooms refers to a lot of different activities, and it depends on kind of the school context, how it’s being enforced. But it can refer to following a curriculum the way that it was paced by the publisher. So on a given day, you’re told what you’re supposed to be teaching. It can also refer to following a script that a publisher has written out, and so the teacher is standing in front of the class reading the script word for word. 

Sometimes, fidelity refers to not only what the teacher says, but how they say it. So there can be direct instructions for how they’re supposed to dress and how they’re supposed to hold their body and what’s supposed to be on the walls. In some schools, theoretically, teachers are supposed to follow things to fidelity, but there’s an understanding that there’s wiggle room. And in other schools, an administrator will walk into a classroom and the teacher needs to be doing the exact thing that they’ve been designated to do at that exact hour and that exact moment of the day. So it looks different depending on the school. 

The term also comes from, as I understand it, and again, it was hard to trace this exactly, but it seems to come from the lab sciences with the idea that you are following a protocol, like, say, the making of a vaccine to fidelity. So you want to make sure that you get the dosing exactly right in the lab. If you’re testing it, you want to make sure that you have followed the protocol to fidelity. Translated into schools, I think the idea came in that you might have a curriculum, such as the one that the teacher I was mentioning was using, where the authors of the curriculum have said, if you follow this word for word to fidelity, the children will have success. Or we’d like to see if the children will have success if you follow this word for word to fidelity. So essentially the children are now kind of creatures in a lab being tested on and you’re following it to fidelity.

So that’s kind of the background of the word. And what scares me about it is that teaching isn’t about following a protocol to fidelity, because children are unpredictable and classrooms are unpredictable and learning is unpredictable. And so if you follow to fidelity, the curriculum, it means that you’re not following to fidelity your students and those are the people who you should be faithful to, the children and their families. So the teacher who I mentioned before, she essentially violated fidelity by changing the curriculum. But in doing so, she made sure that her children could learn, which was the true goal.

[00:11:33] Amy H-L: It sounds to me as though you’re saying that fidelity and ethics are not compatible… .If a teacher is actually teaching to fidelity, either the school policy and or the teacher are not treating the students ethically. 

[00:11:49] Cara F: Yeah, and this is where I think Aristotle’s distinction between practical wisdom, which involves actions in human affairs, and craft, maybe shows up, although I’m not sure crafts are always things we do to fidelity in a particular way either. But there are things where fidelity is really important such as vaccinations and making sure that you have the correct dosage of something. There are places where it’s a good policy in certain scientific labs to be testing an experiment to fidelity. The issue is that again, a classroom is not a lab. People are unpredictable. And so in any space where we’re dealing with the messiness and complexity of the individual human, we have to be able to diverge. So even thinking about medicine, for example, a doctor, they’re probably, in most cases, going to follow fidelity in terms of the prescription doses that they’re offering. They’re going to follow a protocol. But where they’re not following the protocol is in their human interactions with their patient. And so there’s this nuance really, in every field, there are places where you need fidelity and there are places where you want practical wisdom.

[00:13:04] Jon M: Do you find other philosophers or other teachers having difficulty understanding the connections between 

[00:13:11] Cara F: Between philosophy and teacher ed? 

[00:13:13] Jon M: And teaching or teacher ed.

[00:13:14] Cara F: Yeah, that’s really an interesting question. Um, yes and no. So I write about it in the book. The book came out of a class, really a series of classes, with students. And it was a class that my undergraduate early childhood students… It was called theories, but I pushed it to be more about philosophy. They were resistant to taking the class. I did an intake survey at the beginning, and I asked what they were interested in, and they said, uh it was like, it fit in their schedule. And the word philosophy was really intimidating to them, and they said, this is like someone else’s work. But once we started getting into the class, and in the book, I scaffold how we slowly move from analyzing images to analyzing children’s books to analyzing works like Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, the students started saying, “Well, if this is philosophy, sign me up.” They even said,” this is the class that I needed. This is exactly what I should be thinking about as a teacher. This is why I became a teacher. It’s to be asking these deep questions about what are we doing in the classroom. Why are we there? How do we help children? How do we do good work in the world?” And so I don’t think that there is any resistance when I work with in -service or pre-service teachers in doing the philosophical work that I describe in the book, but they wouldn’t necessarily call themselves philosophers until they’ve experienced philosophy as accessible.

And that’s because philosophy is a discipline that often involves a lot of jargon, a very particular text that may or may not relate to the teachers, some rules about how you’re supposed to conduct yourself that are pretty rigid and narrow. And so when we challenge that, teachers become more interested. 

And I guess one other area I would add in is that the canon of philosophy is mostly old Western white men. That’s the canon that we read of philosophy, at least in the United States. And that literature isn’t particularly interesting to a lot of people or feels like it’s welcoming or inviting or about the teachers necessarily. So another key element of my work in teaching philosophy, and this shows up throughout the book, is bringing in philosophers such as bell hooks or Maria Lugones, who are more interesting and accessible to many of the teachers that I work with.

The other part of your question was about whether philosophers feel like they should be talking to educators. And I think some philosophers have no interest at all, and I don’t really know those philosophers, and so I can’t really speak to them. There’s a long tradition of philosophy being very closely linked to education because if we think about how people think and how they know, then immediately teaching becomes involved. And then philosophers of education often are excited about the idea of working with teachers. But they’re not necessarily fluent in the language of teaching or the language that the teachers speak. And so I think I enter into this conversation and what my particular offering is to the community and philosophy of ed is that I’m fluent as an early childhood teacher, I’ve done that for my whole adult life, and I’m fluent in philosophy, and so I can work in both worlds.

[00:16:50] Amy H-L: Before we transition to ethics specifically and why your book is titled “Teaching from an Ethical Center,” it seems that you’re saying we also need to teach from a philosophical center, perhaps.

[00:17:04] Cara F: Yeah, I think we need to be constantly asking why, and I think another place where there is a disconnect between philosophers of education is that successful teachers know that even the tiniest things that they do have deep import. For example, whom we call on has a big impact. Philosophers who don’t know classrooms well aren’t necessarily skilled at noticing that there’s meaning and importance in these really, kind of, what seem to be mundane acts. And on the flip, teachers… you know, I said teachers who teach well tend to notice this, but teachers also aren’t always thinking that deeply about things like word choice. And so, for example, in the chapter that I write on language use and word analysis in the book, I use an anecdote of a teacher who kept telling children to sit on their “brain button.” And by this, she meant sit on their bottoms. And so, I parsed that in the chapter thinking, well, what does it mean to say that sitting on your bottom makes your brain work. Like there’s so many elements of that phrase that are worrisome to me. And I suspect that if I had spent time with that teacher talking with her about what she meant by that word, she might stop using the phrase, too. And so again, bringing these two areas of thinking together helps us to teach better and to think better about teaching.

[00:18:44] Amy H-L: What do you mean by teaching from an ethical center?

[00:18:49] Cara F: Teaching should be motivated by a core set of values and commitments. And this is again, where in defining practical wisdom, I move a little bit away from the ancient Greeks because for them, there was a predetermined set of values and an understanding that we could get at what was right, and that that was shared. And I think in contemporary culture, I would say that our values come from our own personal experiences, from our own personalities, and also from the cultures where we find ourselves. I’ve been interviewing teachers for the last few years about what their core values are. And the truth is that because they’re all part of the same culture in the same profession, more or less, teachers’ core values are pretty similar. They tend to be committed to care, at least broadly defined. And my colleague Doris Santoro has found something really similar, that teachers wake up and they think about teaching, and they think about how to do well by students, and that usually is described as care. The details, though, of what that means shift a little bit from one teacher to another. So for some, it’s about being responsive to their cultural background, and that really is key for that teacher. For other students, it’s about autonomy and making sure that each child has autonomy. For other teachers, protecting freedoms. So having teachers define what their core values are is key to being able to teach from an ethical center. 

And then teachers build their practice from those core values. An example that I think is helpful is: Let’s say that your core value is community. You’ve inherited in your classroom a practice of having different table groups of children competing against each other, but you want the children to work together. If they’re teaching from their ethical center, then they need another way of managing their class, if they’re trying to build a community where everyone works together rather than having the kids compete with each other. And so the first step of teaching from an ethical center is helping people determine what that center is. And that’s kind of where my book begins. And then eventually, it’s helping them figure out what are the practices that are going to best support that center.

[00:20:58] Jon M: It’s really interesting what you were saying, that your colleagues were finding that care was a central element in most teachers’ ethical viewpoint, but obviously a lot of the students in your classes and also certainly teachers around the country may have ethical centers in addition to wanting to care that are very different. How does that play out in class? And then, I guess, tied to that is what does it mean for teachers whose ethical centers are just fundamentally different from the ones that you talk about it in the book? In other words, if people are finding their ethical center, but their ethical center, let’s say, I can imagine this– traditional Catholic schools, you know. For generations, the teachers cared, but their sense of what care meant was obviously very different in a lot of ways as would play out in practice from, say, the practices in your classrooms. So what does that mean in terms of people following their ethical centers?

[00:22:02] Cara F: So, for me, it’s really complicated. In the book. I state directly that a key commitment for me is equity, and I’m direct with students as well about what my core commitments are. And I do think it’s important to lay bare what some of my agenda is as I go into these relationships. Nell Noddings used the phrase confirmation in an article that she wrote. And she talked about confirmation, about listening to what somebody’s ethics are and then helping them and then naming and recognizing where they come from and then helping them grow from that particular place. And a big part of the book is about learning how to listen to others’ ideas. So learning how to listen to texts, but also learning how to listen to teachers. So when I work with a teacher in my classes, or one on one, I try to first figure out what..again, I ask them what are your core values? What’s guiding you here? What kinds of practices do you draw on? And then I try to figure out how to work with that. And so, where I differ, I think, from some teachal educators is that I am committed to social justice, for example, but I’m not committed to convincing the teachers I work with that they should be committed to. What I am committed to is that they can learn how to express what they’re trying to accomplish, that they can refine it along their own terms, that they’re open to being exposed to other perspectives, both their classmates and from books and from me, and then that we can be in conversation about how they can reach their goals.

[00:23:55] Amy H-L: Even if their goals are way different from yours? Is that what we want, for teachers each to have their own ethical center, even though obviously they overlap a lot? And then to teach from that center? And I might add that, and I think I can speak for Jon as well, that we would like to, our ethics follow a certain pattern. We think about schools as not just about nurturing students, but also about creating a fairer and more compassionate society. 

[00:24:28] Cara F: These are such good questions. Dirk Roosevelt, I think, used this… let me try to get it correctly as he said it. In a similar conversation at a conference, he reminded that we don’t develop our ethics in a vacuum, that we do it pluralistically, and when I teach, when I talk about freedom, for example, I tell students that they have a right to freedom within the confines of a respectful classroom space, and so you’re free to move how you want.

You’re free to stand up when you need to, but you’re not free to stand up in front of your classmate because that is impinging on the freedom of others. And so when I think about what our core values are in the classroom, I think, I guess I have faith in pluralism, that when there are structures in place for us to be able to listen and talk to each other, enough nuance in any given community can emerge so that we can begin to learn ways of taking into account what other people believe and need.

And so I guess I put a lot of faith in creating spaces where people get to be in dialogue and to really hear from each other and recognize each other’s humanity. And I trust that in those spaces, ethics are not going to be so far off from my own that I can’t work with them. That’s how I approach it.

And so, again, a key part of the book is learning learning how to carefully listen to others and how to carefully articulate your own stance because I believe that that brings together a better world.

[00:26:23] Amy H-L: Do you think that schools as such can or should have ethical centers, or Is it all about teachers’ individual ethical centers?

[00:26:33] Cara F: I think that schools absolutely should in the sense that they should have commitments that go beyond skill work, for example, but that those those centers should be created again through community and that the community is not just the teachers, but it’s also the children and the families that are in that space. So if you build places where there are structures for people to talk about what their core values are, and then you come together and you come up with a list of what the community holds dear, that’s where the center would come from.

So I do this values interview, which I write about, where you ask again, you say, what are your core values and where do those come from? And how do they live in your daily practice or your daily living. And I’ve done these with people one on one in interviews, but I’ve also done these as a class where people come together and they talk to each other about what their values are with their peers and the process is intimate. They always leave feeling like they’ve come to know the other person really well. And then it’s also a way for us to start to talk about what our core commitments are as a community and maybe see where we differ in important ways from other people, 

[00:27:51] Jon M: Most schools are not Deweyan in practice. What recommendations do you give your teacher ed students when they find themselves in schools with highly restrictive practices? I know you mentioned one student in particular that you had a conversation with who was talking about being in a situation like that, but are there general things that you can say, because obviously a lot of students are going to go back and find that that they’re in situations that are not comfortable.

[00:28:22] Cara F: Absolutely. So, the philosopher Hannah Arendt has a story, or not a story, looking at documents, she says that in the few places during the Second World War, where a population of people stood up against the Nazis and spoke out directly about what they saw happening in the cruelty and the oppressions that they were witnessing, that there were instances where the Nazis backed down and actually changed their mind. And so she uses this to say that we need spaces of dialogue and direct confrontation, that we form our political and ethical center in communion with others. And so if you’re in a situation where everybody is at least publicly stating the same thing, it becomes harder and harder to hold a different opinion, but the moment that somebody voices a different way of seeing things, it puts that other vision in the world. It serves as a reminder or pulls people up short. I think that there are places in schools where teachers resist kind of more covertly, but I’ve also found that when a teacher is clearly able to say this needs to change and this needs to be done differently. They don’t necessarily get the immediate results that they want, but they are able to change. Sometimes they do. And often they’re able to slowly kind of change the culture. And that when they say that with more than one person, so it becomes a group of people coming forward and saying they want to change, then you see shifts, even in pretty restrictive cases. So for one example, these were interviews that made their way into the book, but I don’t write about this in the book. There were a few teachers at a school who felt like this: children in their school were coming in after Covid with a lot of social emotional needs not being met. And these teachers got together and they said, we’re going to try this new curriculum that’s more play-based. And they came up with a plan. They came up with a reason for the plan. They brought it to the administration and they were able to pilot this new curriculum. And then, as they piloted it, people could see the benefits of what they were doing. 

In another case, a teacher in a Head Start, the children were hungry in her school. They were coming in hungry and the policy was you only eat at lunchtime in the school. And she said, I’m teaching at a Head Start. Kids are coming into this school hungry. I can’t teach kids who are hungry. At the time, she was an assistant teacher and she went to the administration and said, we need to feed kids when they’re hungry. When she went to the administration, it was around a particular child. The administration agreed that children should be fed when they were hungry. The policy that they were willing to adapt was they were willing to feed the kids outside of the regular classroom. They weren’t willing to just like have snack available in the classroom for the kids at all times. So she didn’t get exactly what she wanted, which was that she thought food should be available to kids whenever they wanted it. But she did start to make these inroads and change the school and remind everyone we’re ethically responsible to feeding children who are hungry. That’s part of our work. 

[00:31:52] Amy H-L: As you know, in December, some parents in Massachusetts sued Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell, claiming that they misrepresented their programs as research based. Do you want to comment on what you think the implications of the suit are to curriculum?

[00:32:08] Jon M: Yes. I guess I would add another aspect to that. What does it mean if people start suing against curriculum in general? Obviously this is a specific case, but maybe you think it has more general implications.

[00:32:23] Cara F: I’ve been thinking about a lot in connection to the case. There’s a podcast that you I’m sure are well aware of sold a story and they do essentially a takedown of Lucy Calkins’s curriculum. And the part of the podcast that interests me the most was there’s one teacher who, or many teachers actually, but there’s a quote that I’m thinking of specifically, where the teacher expresses deep regret that for years and years she was teaching the children a curriculum that wasn’t working for her students. And she even says, “I could see it wasn’t working, but I had bought so deeply into this curriculum that I kept doing it and doing it.” What really strikes me about that comment is that, is it makes me wonder: Was this teacher just doing it because she so deeply believed in the curriculum or was she being required to teach a curriculum and had she been told throughout her career, if you just follow the curriculum, everything will work out fine?

I think that when we create a culture where fidelity is the norm, we also create one where teachers are operating without being able to notice and attend to what they see in front of them. And it means that they do things that are deeply harmful to children. So, when I was a teacher, there were elements of Lucy Calkins’s curriculum that I used, but because I had this philosophy background, I was good at reading text for the deeper meaning, and the part of Lucy Calkins’s curriculum that I really admired was the chance for children to spend a lot of time engaging directly in writing. There were parts where I diverged from what the curriculum said, because I could see it wasn’t working well for my students. As an example, which I do write about, her curriculum centers very heavily on teaching children how to write by writing their own personal narratives, and I worked with children who had all kinds of backgrounds that they were bringing into school, and many of them didn’t want to write about their home life in school. And so I appreciated that the personal narrative was getting kids to write details, it wasn’t working well for the population I was working with. And so I diverged from the curriculum. 

So to bring it back to the court case, no curriculum is perfect, and no curriculum is going to work for every single child. It seems to me very dangerous to start suing a curriculum or suing a publisher when things don’t work perfectly. And on the other hand, the publishers shouldn’t be advocating for teachers to follow what they’re doing to fidelity. It should always be a guide that’s supporting the teacher that they can diverge from as they see fit.

[00:35:24] Amy H-L: It’s always seemed to me very disrespectful to teachers to expect fidelity. So it’s not only unethical and unwise in its effect on children, but also on the teachers themselves. 

[00:35:40] Cara F: Absolutely. The teacher who I’m thinking of in the Soul to Story podcast, I remember what her name is, at least according to the podcast, but I’m not calling it out because I have to give that teacher the benefit of the doubt, to assume that if she was being given opportunities to assess the curriculum in front of her, study her own students, and respond with wisdom, she would have done things differently. And I think that’s, again, that’s where philosophy comes back in for me, because to be a philosopher is to examine what you see in front of you and to ask big questions. And this is the work of teaching, or it should be the work of teaching, and it is certainly the work that teachers, because I’ve worked with thousands of teachers at this point, this is the work teachers want to be doing.

[00:36:32] Jon M: Even moving beyond a specific curriculum, I hear stories, especially, I think, from some charter schools, where teachers are being told basically to follow a script, which just seems totally counter to everything that the concept of teaching should mean. 

[00:36:53] Cara F: Yeah, again, I think another way of putting this is that to engage with practical wisdom demands that you’re able to take in the environment and perceive what’s going on around you and then make ethical judgments And at every step of that process you have a thinking being. What I think philosophy as a discipline does for us is it offers some ways of systematically interrogating what’s in front of you.

So for example, a more analytic approach to a word like fidelity is parsing that word. And you might think about the origins and you might think about where it lives in our current culture. And you might think about an ameliorative approach, how that word could be better served, fidelity to whom is one example of it.

Another tool of philosophy that I rely pretty heavily on is genealogy, thinking where ideas come from. Where did this idea of a script come from? My friend Christina Camerano years ago was exposed to the scripting of a curriculum with a charter school, and her first response was this is a little bit like the Emile. There is this element in Western philosophy and in Rousseau’s Emile, which is quite a famous book where he says, this is the program for a particular child. So thinking about, well, where did these scripts come from? Why are we so inclined towards them? I think is also important philosophical work. 

[00:38:41] Jon M: This is a little bit of different of a question, but you have a podcast and have thought a lot about the role of podcasts. What do you think the similarities and differences are in reaching audiences through a podcast and through a book?

[00:38:55] Cara F: One of the things…

[00:38:57] Jon M: Feel free to talk about your podcast, by the way. 

[00:38:59] Cara F: So I have, I have a podcast called “Thinking in the Midst” where we interview people about philosophy and education, some people who call themselves philosophers, some people who call themselves teachers, some people who call themselves literacy professors. And we interview all kinds of people, but people who find synergy between philosophy of education. And I also have a podcast called “Teaching from an Ethical Center: An Inquiry Among Friends,” where I interview teachers and use the interviews that I described in my book to interview teachers about their practice.

So this connects actually to Emile.When Rousseau wrote the book Emile, which is quite a long text, people copied what he told in this book word for word with their children. They followed the script. And some elements, he had some unusual practices that he was describing one of them being exposing children to the elements so that they could become heartier. And when people wrote to him and shared what they were doing, he responded in different ways. Rousseau is not a particularly consistent thinker. But one of the ways he responded was it wasn’t supposed to be a recipe. So the thing about a podcast, especially one such as the one that you have or the one that I have is that when it’s a dialogic podcast, things aren’t set in stone. You see people kind of thinking in action, and there’s a back and forth that happens. And to me, in a way, that is really the work of philosophy, because doing philosophy is having live ideas that move back and forth. Once something gets put on paper, the dialogue continues with the reader, but you, the author, are no longer in the dialogue directly anymore, and ideas can get kind of stuck or codified. And so you may, as a thinker, have moved past them because your mind is always going, but the book doesn’t capture that. 

One example I like is that Hannah Arendt famously died before she finished her last book, “The Life of the Mind.” It was found, as I understand it, on her typewriter. And I always just think about this woman who was revising her ideas into the basically the very moment that she that she died. I think that speaks to her vision of philosophy as this keeping alive of ideas, and it speaks, I guess, to my own as well. And so podcasts, yeah, they’re just so much more dynamic.

[00:41:35] Jon M: Thank you, Dr. Cara Furman of Hunter College. 

[00:41:38] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. Check out our new video series, What Would YOU Do?, a collaboration with Professor Meira Levinson of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and EdEthics. Go to our website, ethicalschools.org, and click Video. The goal of this series is not to provide right answers, but to illustrate a variety of ethical viewpoints.

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