Philosophy of Education. (2^nd edition). By Nel Noddings

Better Together: The Role of Critical Friendship in Empowering Early Career Academics

“…Critical friendship was operationalized in our study as an authentic friendship between people with mutual understanding of one another's career context and aspirations (Baskerville & Goldblatt, 2009;Wideman-Johnston & Brewer, 2014). We use Noddings' (2006) ethic of care as a theoretical and conceptual framework to ground the study. We used narrative inquiry to illuminate how critical friendship was enacted during turbulent times experienced in our emerging academic careers.…”

“…In this context, collaboration with the enemy-the rival early career researcher-is undertaken in joyful shared defiance. (p. 288) Furthermore, Noddings (2006) described the ethic of care with feminist approaches to educational philosophy, though Noddings clarified that caring should not be considered a feminine or women's ethic. Within the ethic of care, the ultimate goal is to promote natural caring and to do this, Noddings repeatedly turned to the need for trusting relationships and mutual agreement on what caring and cared-for represents in a given relationship.…”

“…In the ethic of care, there is a focus on trusting and caring relationships. Noddings (2006) stated that "ethical caring's great contribution is to guide action long enough for natural caring to be restored and for people once again to interact with mutual and spontaneous regard" (p. 222). We suggest that the development of a critical friendship should be cradled in the ethic of care, but that the full experience of being in a critical friendship is ideally the fulfillment of care beyond a prescribed ethic.…”

“…Relying on methods by Punch (2009), we engaged in a process of summarizing, documenting, organizing, analyzing, and synthesizing until small units of meaning were collapsed into larger ideas, and eventually, themes. Utilizing narrative inquiry for this study gave us the opportunity to "come to new understandings" (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 89) about our critical friendship and its role in growing an ethic of care (Noddings, 2006).…”

“…In this research study, we use narrative inquiry to illuminate the role our critical friendship has played in our academic experience. Turning to the ethic of care (Noddings, 2006) as a theoretical and conceptual framework, we reveal to ourselves, and to the academic landscape, the common themes that contextualize academia for emerging scholars, including seeking employment, managing our roles as graduate students, dealing with tensions in the workplace, and managing the logistics of personal life events as they pertain to the workplace. The ethic of care was steeped into the continued development of each cyclical phase of our critical friendship (Wideman-Johnston & Brewer, 2014).…”