Teaching from an Ethical Center: Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction, by Cara E.Furman, Harvard Education Press, 2024, 304 pp.

Classroom teachers benefit, and their practice grows, through reflection on the values at the core of their professional identity. This argument has been sustained by a chorus of scholars working in philosophy and teaching practice, yet acting on this argument remains a challenge (Campbell 2008; Hansen 1995, 2021; Orchard et al. 2020; Santoro 2018). This is often due to the prohibitive practicalities of adding the work of values reflection into preservice and in-service educator professional development. The result is that the crucial work of values development in teaching operates dichotomously: championed and called for in the scholarly work of philosophy of education and sometimes carried out through small-scale programming associated with a university program or an ambitious and practically oriented scholar; almost nonexistent in typical teacher training programs and professional development. Teaching from an Ethical Center: Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction offers a different approach: a guide for embedding philosophical inquiry into the preservice teaching classroom so that values development and articulation occur as part of the unit planning, book studies, and activity practice that are the bread and butter of university teaching accreditation programs. Through sharing her firsthand experience teaching in a state university teacher preparation program and showcasing her students' authentic, profound, and values-laden work, Furman shows readers that her method works. But Teaching from an Ethical Center is more than just a methodological text. In explaining and illustrating her and her students' work, Furman unveils the philosophical inquiry that occurs organically and continuously in classrooms and teacher preparation programs. The result is that the book can be read, appreciated, and used by both educators—the instructional coaches, course instructors, administrators, and classroom teachers who would be most apt to put Furman's method into practice—as well as the philosophers of education who will recognize and applaud her inquiry and argumentation. It is likely especially important for philosophers of education working in teacher education who wish to make philosophical inquiry accessible to the “philosophically curious” everyday practitioner. To begin with, Furman's structural choices invite a wide audience. The book is organized according to the arc of her preservice elementary education course so that it can be used as a companion text for instructors and students working in a literacy, early childhood, or foundations course. The opening chapter argues that preservice teachers need to learn to identify their ethical “compass” and provides a description of compass-building activities students experience during the first classes in her semester, including a block-building exercise and interviewing one another. Furman illustrates how she makes the case to her students that values matter in teaching, subtly and explicitly inviting them into introspection and discussion to help them activate and articulate their values. She begins by presenting a list of values to her students and asking them to reflect on how these values are conveyed through everyday classroom experiences, such as the block-building exercise. Later, as her preservice teachers describe how they hope to set up their classrooms, what goals they have for their students, and what matters to them in education through weekly reflection prompts and an interview with a classmate, they practice articulating their own sets of values and reflecting on how to convey them through the minutiae of their classroom decision-making. The chapter is accessible both to philosophers who will follow her review of the importance of values development through a philosophy of education lens (particularly her invocation of Bakhtin's hybridization to describe the fluid movement between theory and practice) and to practitioners who will resonate with her classroom narratives and can use her exercises on day one of their own courses. Following this introduction to the course and her methods, the subsequent chapters each profile a different approach to developing one's values as an educator through practical activities linked to Furman's course pedagogy: values learned through personal history, values learned through close reading of picture books and philosophical texts, values developed and understood through metaphor, and values developed and understood through discussion. The final two chapters introduce a range of activities that teachers and teacher educators can use to excavate, interrogate, and articulate values in their practice. Each chapter is structured according to a familiar teacher-training model: “I Do/We Do/You Do,” where learners first view a modeled activity, then try it out with the support of the teacher, and then attempt it independently. In Furman's interpretation of the model, she first describes her first-person experience with an ethical issue in teaching, then explains what she and her students did in her own classroom to address that issue, then offers a succinct summary of several possibilities for the reader to try in their own practice. She closes each chapter with a reflective section that connects the “what” and the “why” of the possibilities with the “values in action” surrounding the issue and her practices. This structure facilitates philosophical inquiry into the teaching models and the values they bring forth. In each chapter, Furman draws on philosophical interlocutors to frame and justify the values development described in that chapter. Her choice of interlocutors is wide-ranging: as she explains in the introduction, Furman interprets “philosopher” expansively. In one excellent discussion of conversing and listening, she draws on the philosophical teachings of Myisha Cherry, Patricia Carini, and Carla Shalaby to conceptualize the meaning of care from multiple perspectives (106–12). She also treats her interlocutors as partners in the work of sharing and discussing values instead of putting them on a pedestal to admire or interpret, ensuring that their teaching remains accessible to practitioner readers. This approach reifies the tenet of Black Feminist philosophy, found throughout the book, that theory development and theoretical learning must be communal practices in the service of self-knowledge and social transformation. These principles are embodied and expressed through the focus and messaging of Furman's argument as well as in the structure of the book as a whole. By intertwining classroom vignettes, practical activities, philosophical reflection, and first-person experience, Furman creates a new genre: a form of educational ethics where no style of inquiry takes precedence and all are necessary for developing teachers' core values and ethical centers in the midst of their practical learning. This type of book is clearly needed in the face of the reality that teachers' work and language are typically not recognized as ethical and that teachers, conversely, often are unable to recognize their own language and experience as ethical (a challenge that Furman acknowledges on page 29). The field needs more exemplars of how to transform a status quo that sees teaching as a technical skill to master, rather than a practice based on a professional ethos. The pedagogy and classroom activities Furman offers in this book are just that. These include fresh ideas for philosophy pedagogy that are usable with preservice teachers as well as philosophers, from the embodied philosophy ideas on pages 138–39 to the tips for reviewing work on pages 142–43, as well as activities specifically for values development. Having used the “I am From” poem exercise in chapter 2 in a class on epistemology, I can attest to its ability to link personal history and beliefs about knowledge for students learning both as new concepts. I am eager to try out the “values wall” (219) and “ethical interviews” (223–24) with preservice and in-service teachers in professional development centered around values and ethical dilemmas in education. Overall, Furman's work makes it impossible to argue that philosophical inquiry is separate from the teaching profession or that values development is too arcane or abstract for educator professional development. Educators and philosophers alike can find rich theoretical discussion, usable activities to enrich lesson planning, and thoughtful first-person reflection on teaching and philosophy in Furman's book to hone their own and their students' ethical centers.