Robert J. Nash

Three Conceptions of Ethics for Teacher Educators.

Applied ethics courses in education emphasize an analytical or rules/principles ap proach to resolving ethical dilemmas. Two other fruitful approaches, character/struc ture and background beliefs/ideals, tend to be ignored or minimized in these courses. Every applied ethics course should include rigorous preparation in all three approaches if teachers are to appreciate fully the complexity of ethical decision making. This essay attempts to restore a balance among the three approaches.

Inviting Atheists to the Table: A Modest Proposal for Higher Education

—When I begin to feel that others are not judging me as less than human because I am an atheist, I will be open to their religious ideas. When I can be assured that I am not viewed as morally askew because I do not go to church or believe in God, then I am willing to have honest conversations about religion and spirituality. We talk a lot about pluralism and tolerance in higher education. But where is the acceptance of non-believers? When will atheists like myself feel that it is safe for us to state our ideas without believers’ feeling sorry for us, or worse? I don’t care. The only person, real or imaginary, transcendent or material, that I can count on is myself—my own mind, ideas, decisions, and judgments. There is no divine destiny or master plan. Does believing this make me a bad person? Kristin, a graduate student

Preparing New Educational Professionals for Non-public School Settings

Despite recent gloomy predictions that teacher education will grow increasingly conservative, reactive, isolationist, and mediocre in the next five years, some colleges of education are in the initial stages of restructuring the goals, practices, and curricula of their programs to prepare a new kind of professional-the educational specialist who can function effectively in a variety of non-public school settings. These colleges are not content to retrench around narrowly defined competency programs serving more and more specialized clientele. Neither are they predisposed to work only with inservice teachers, counselors, and administrators in teacher centers or on-site workshops. They are sensitive to the rapid growth of alternative educational programs and many of them have been acutely attentive to needs of undergraduate students who want a more eclectic major than can be found in the academic disciplines. Such students usually comprise two categories : Those who want to enter the human service field as educators in some creative and flexible way without having to serve an apprenticeship in public school classrooms or in rigid social work

Constructing A Spirituality of Teaching: A Personal Perspective

“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto – God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.” Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature, 1999

Beyond Marginality: A New Role for Foundations of Education.

An historical case can be made that foundational studies have always been a marginal species in teacher education. With the exception of the foundational glory days of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries when Teachers College, Columbia University, built its reputation on such intellectual luminaries as Edward L. Thorndike, Paul Monroe, and John Dewey, the function and status of foundational studies in professional training have been unsettled. Cohen (1976), in an extensive historical analysis of the social and humanistic foundations of education, has shown how foundational scholars have been their own worst enemies throughout the twentieth century. Aligning themselves with one of two armed camps-as academicians or functionalists-

Can the Foundations of Education Survive?--Grappling with Our Death Wish.

Developing new ways of looking at who teachers are, where they work, and what they believe should be a high priority for all foundational faculties. The truth is becoming more obvious: the foundations of education, long the academic staple of teacher preparation, are in serious trouble. The City University of New York (CUNY) system has recently announced drastic cutbacks in foundational areas. Dozens of untenured faculty are being dismissed, while senior faculty are being reassigned to other departments. Elsewhere around the country, administrators curtail or dissolve our program. And, pathetically, we who are the endangered species in teacher education continue

The Time Has Come to Create Meaning-Making Centers on College Campuses.

Robert J. Nash and Jennifer J. J. Jang argue that students have a great need to find a “meaning to live for,” a la Victor Frankl, and make a case for creating a space for students and educators to contextualize learning experiences dealing with the universal, existential questions of life.

The Paucity of the Investment Metaphor and Other Misunderstandings.

The issue of salary benefits for advanced degrees and graduate course work has long needed to be reexamined; however, to make the investment metaphor the dominant focus in reevaluating the worth of university-based inservice education is extremely limiting. The metaphor overextends itself, thus reducing the whole inservice enterprise to a simple profit-loss venture. The metaphor also recalls the accountability debate of the early seventies and the shrillness of its polarized positions. On the surface, inservice training comparisons to busi-

Does Warren A. Nord Make a Difference

I do not mean the title of this essay to be blasphemous or even clever. While it is true that I am playing on the title of Nord’s book, Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion Seriously in Our Schools and Universities, I am also hoping to convey to readers the answer to the personal question that drives this brief essay: What has the work of Warren Nord in the field of religion and education meant to me? In truth, his work has made an enormous difference in my professorial life, both as a teacher and as an author. I only wish that I had the opportunity to convey to Warren Nord while he was alive how important his work has been to me through the years. I cite him often in much of my work on religion and education; and when I am not citing him directly, he has served as one of my formative philosophical muses. I have written several books and articles on religion, spirituality, and teaching. I am also a professor of 40-plus years who, over two decades ago, created, and continues to teach, the first religion and education course ever offered in a professional school in the United States. I have tried to put into practice what Nord has written about in his latest book, so I know first-hand what works in the classroom and what else might be necessary in teaching for religious literacy. In this connection, I will use the question I pose in the title of this essay to talk about the enormous impact that Nord’s work has had on my pedagogy of education and religion in a college that prepares public school teachers, administrators, and other human service professionals. In addition to religion

Facing One Another in This Place: Using Moral Conversation to Talk About Controversial Topics in College Settings

In moral conversation, we attempt to create a safe space for conversing about very controversial issues. However, creating a safe, yet robust, conversational space throughout the campus, on topics as controversial as religious pluralism, can be difficult. In this article I give an example of one recent failure of mine to put May Sarton’s inspiring words of “presence” into practice, as well as present a series of recommendations for repairing the subsequent damage to moral conversation. This paper is based on a presentation given at the 2008 Institute on College Student Values in Tallahassee, Florida.