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Mentoring Moral Courage: Resources in Liberation Ethics, Community Service, and the Social Commitment of the Academy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
The essay argues that resources in Scripture, tradition, and social theory are important but insufficient to the task of teaching social ethics. Liberation ethics promotes not only diverse epistemologies to evaluate the structures that mediate social relations, but also moral courage to execute social responsibility. Given this agenda, teaching social ethics also requires community-based learning experiences, democratic classrooms, and the social commitment of the academy. Drawing on student writing and the example of the author's own academic institution, the essay argues that multiple resources and sites are needed to educate students in ethical theory and moral courage.
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- Creative Teaching
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- Copyright © The College Theology Society 1999
References
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2 I find this appropriation of the American dream also to be true of some of the relatively few students I teach who come from working-class/working-poor families. Most of these students, however, are already critical of the race- and gender-stratified class society in the U.S., and use courses like mine to help them better analyze structures with which they are already too familiar. Most of these students eschew direct service work in the course and seek out groups involved in social change, like community and labor organizing.
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4 I am grateful to the students in my social ethics classes whose wisdom and insight made this essay possible. I also wish to thank Carolyn Howe and a blind reviewer of this essay for suggestions on an earlier version.
5 The following description of ways to look at the relationship between community-based learning and the classroom were evident in a workshop on Service Learning offered by the Maine Campus Compact at the University of New England on August 22-24, 1997. I am grateful to Carolyn Howe who attended with me for important suggestions about ways to look at this relationship. For a brief but representative bibliography on Service Learning see Marullo, Sam, “The Service Learning Movement in Higher Education: An Academic Response to Troubled Times,” The Sociological Imagination 33/2 (1996): 134–37.Google Scholar
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