Material #16: Dramatic rehearsal
Given the by turns complex and inspiring experience of navigating the NYC high school application process with one of my sons, I’ve been mulling pedagogy more than usual. It’s something that has always interested me and that I weave into my work when I can, but consciously and sub-consciously it has been even more on my mind recently.
Somewhere along the way, while thinking about the value of drama in education, I encountered Maurice Hamington’s article “Care Ethics, John Dewey’s ‘Dramatic Rehearsal,’ and Moral Education.” (There’s the additional factor here that I’m drawn to Dewey given that our cat has the same name, but that’s another story).
The article begins with this quote from Dewey:
“[Moral] deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action.”
It then identifies parallels between Dewey’s pragmatism and feminist care ethics, defining care ethics as an approach “that centers on context and relationships over rubrics of moral adjudication”. The five parallels it hones in on are the following. (I’ve included ellipses to keep this post relatively short, but you can access the full article and its references here):
“1. Particularism. For Dewey, moral deliberation is an outgrowth of emergent situations ‘where we need to discover what is good and right.’ Although care ethicists avoid the term ‘right,’ they do claim that individual situations give rise to the concrete imaginative material [my itals] necessary for empathy and care.
2. Eliding ends and means distinctions. [Philosopher] Virginia Held describes the ethics of care as both a ‘practice and a value.’ As a practice or caring labor, a caregiver works on behalf of another to allow them to grow and flourish. As a value, caring becomes a normative standard of moral assessment but not in a forced choice or dichotomous manner. Similarly, Dewey’s concept of the ‘ends-in-view’ points to a false distinction between ends and means…In this regard, caring can be described as a skill and a disposition — an approach to the world, or to use a Deweyan concept, a habit — but it is also a moral ideal that is manifested in action.
3. Extended temporal horizons. Dewey recognizes that moral deliberation takes time in the playing out of imaginative possibilities. Moral rules or consequential calculations, although often complex, are rubrics that can cut short the time necessary to engage in a full moral deliberation. Because care ethics is fundamentally relational, it seeks long-term solutions that are not always easily derived…
4. Complex consequentialism that integrates relational considerations. Dewey is very concerned with the consequences of moral decisions but believes there needs to be a depth of understanding that moves beyond a utilitarian calculus: ‘It is sympathy which saves consideration of consequences from degenerating into mere calculation.’
5. Valuing Emotion. Both Dewey and Noddings [Nel Noddings, a feminist educator and philosopher] believe emotion has a positive role to play in morality, but both are careful to qualify their claims. Noddings claims that caring receptivity for the other requires ‘feeling and sensitivity’ but that emotion alone cannot ensure caring. Similarly, Dewey writes, ‘Emotional reactions form the chief materials of our knowledge of ourselves and of others.’
The drama dimension of the article follows. It unpacks the way in which, when we deliberate moral courses of action, we play out scenarios and their implications in our mind. The process is dramatic, in terms of its “concern for character, its concern for plot, its difference from utilitarian approaches, and its openness to unexpected circumstances”. Character acting takes this a step deeper, with an actor immersing themselves in the perspective of a character, even generating backstories that are not written into the script. In other words, as Hamington puts it, “dramatic rehearsal can be viewed as a pedagogical tool for developing an empathetic imagination.”
I’ve also been thinking recently on the ways that care ethics, or economies of care, can be applied to the built environment. Approaches that acknowledge the deep yet under-recognized value of maintenance of places over time. Maybe the acting comparison and the elements above can be drawn on here, too. All the world’s a stage, after all.
***************************
Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.