Challenges Enacting Caring Teacher Education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the following people who have supported me throughout the dissertation process and in other words acknowledge my context of care. Special thanks to my committee chair Dr. Victoria Fu, for guiding me through the entire dissertation process. I also appreciate the time and input of all my committee members including Dr. Susan Hutchinson who continued to support me even after she transferred to another university. Dr. Doris Martin first helped me think about this topic in scholarly fashion years ago in my first graduate class and supported me long distance throughout the experience. Dr. Melanie Uttech helped me expand my ideas of all the possibilities qualitative research holds and opened the door to my future work as a methodologist. My department chair at Eastern Mennonite University, Dr. Donovan Steiner's, support and flexibility was the reason I was able to take my first doctoral course and envision the possibility of a second one. Dr. Steiner's acknowledgment is also symbolic of the larger church of Mennonites he represents and the generations of a belief in care that my dissertation rests on.

Education has been criticized for a disproportionate focus on the technical aspects of teaching with less focus on its “human” aspects. Consequently, many researchers and theorists have expressed a need to answer what role care plays in education. Our purpose in this review is to examine the definition of caring pedagogies and synthesize relevant research helpful to understanding its application. We briefly consider moral development and ethical care theories pertinent to teaching and learning and synthesize the research findings related to defining and measuring caring pedagogy; as well as developing caring characteristics in teachers and students, caring classroom communities, and caring in unique and challenging contexts. Finally, we argue for more research on developing valid instruments for measuring caring pedagogy and examining under-explored contexts such as higher education and technology-mediated learning. We conclude that caring pedagogy provides a powerful means to student learning improvement, one meriting the greatest attention by educators and education researchers.

STUDYING TEACHER EDUCATION, 2020

Teacher educators who seek to advance social justice perspectives and promote equity-oriented dispositions often engage with challenging and controversial issues relevant to schooling, the lives of students, and the work of teachers. Addressing equity issues and controversial topics can be challenging and fraught with tensions for both students and teacher educators. The purpose of this selfstudy was to gain insight from a critical incident about a class discussion on an issue (i.e., gender normativity in curriculum and classrooms) that occurred in a graduate course for in-service teachers. The critical incident represented a challenging pedagogical moment given diverse perspectives on the issue. The qualitative inquiry was anchored in LaBoskey’s framing elements for self-study. Conceptual frameworks employed in analysis were Berry’s tensions in teacher education and Noddings’s ethic of care. Findings suggest that classroom discussions in moments of tension can be facilitated productively by (a) teacher educators acknowledging that the content under discussion may be of both political and personal relevance; (b) disclosing that the intent of discussions on controversial issues is to share and learn, not indoctrination; and (c) recognizing when continuing a discussion on a controversial issue is pedagogically unproductive. Implications for teaching practice and research are provided.

Teaching Education, 1994

2019

This study leveraged the implementation of co-teaching as a relational model for the teacher training practicum. Specifically, this study examines how teachers in caring collegial relationships foster caring classroom environments, probing the following inquiry question: when co-teachers collaborate, what features of their co-teaching practices do they leverage to cultivate caring relationships among their students? Leveraging care ethics theory, we found that teacher-candidates and their mentorteachers developed practices to cultivate caring classrooms through authentic modeling of complex aspects of relationship-building as well as practicing confirmation – the habit of assuming the best motives possible underlying a given action. This study informs teacher preparation for caring by showing how the student-teacher practicum can be drawn on to cultivate caring among children. 1. Objectives: Co-Teaching toward Caring Co-teaching, a collaborative approach to teacher-candidates’ stude...

According to John Macmurray, 'teaching is one of the foremost of personal relations'. This paper describes that relation in some detail from the perspective of care ethics. This involves a discussion of the central elements in establishing and maintaining relations of care and trust which include listening, dialogue, critical thinking, reflective response, and making thoughtful connections among the disciplines and to life itself. discussion with neither the individual nor the collective, but with the relation. In an encounter or sequence of encounters that can appropriately be called caring, one party acts as carer and the other as cared-for. Over time, in equal relations, the parties regularly exchange positions. Adult caring relations exhibit this mutuality.

SRATE Journal, 2018

For several years, the authors were involved as volunteer literacy tutors in a low-income housing development with predominantly African American residents. In this volunteer role, the authors were troubled by the ways in which the youth and their families were misunderstood and not well served by the schools. The purpose of this study is to emphasize the perceptions and the voices of children, ages 11-16, as it relates to the research question: In a school system focused on closing the achievement gap, what qualities and characteristics do children from low income backgrounds identify in teachers that demonstrate care and respect?

Brock Education Journal, 2017

The purpose of this study was to explore how perceptions of remembered instances ofteacher caring in K-College impacted the motivation of a college student. Implicationsfor teacher preparation programs and educational research were then drawn from theseperceptions. The first part of the title “A Family Affair” stems from the fact that theauthors are members of the same family – Father, Mother, and Son. Both the father andmother had prior knowledge of some (not all) of the instances of caring and non-caringdescribed by their son and thus shared a privileged insider position that offered uniqueinsights while cooperative peer checking was used both during and after the interview tohelp promote the trustworthiness of findings. It was found that the degree of caringshown by teachers had a profound influence on the participant’s willingness to put fortheffort especially in those courses that were not his favorite subjects which suggests that astrong connection exists between caring and st...

Teacher educators have a civic responsibility to prepare novice teachers to foster relationships across cultural, racial, and socioeconomic divides. Care ethics acknowledges this imperative. This study explores how to cultivate the knowledge, skills and dispositions associated with constructing a caring stance toward the work of teaching. Data come from two preservice teacher education courses. A cluster of course activities sought to foster novice teachers' core skills for a caring stance. In particular, one assignment, an ethical dilemma case, gave the novice teachers the opportunity to write a narrative about practice and consider any potential moral implications. Since narrative methodology accounts for context and particularity, the assignment supported novice teachers' consideration of the demands of care in relationship.

Theorizing Feminist Ethics of Care in Early Childhood Practice, 2019

An ethic of care inspires teachers to reflect deeply about what sort of persons are being cultivated through everything teachers do. An ethic of care reveals the potential for education to foster citizens who care about the environment and one another enough to resist apathy, consider others' needs, and act on behalf of others. I became interested in an ethic of care while teaching elementary school due to its recognition of the role of schooling in socialization and cultivation of dispositions. As a teacher educator at a large urban university in an elementary teacher education program for ten years and a former early elementary school teacher for twelve years, I have explored the practical application of the philosophical framework of an ethic of care in early childhood education. As a feminist-postmodern approach to moral education, care ethics makes the most sense in contrast to a traditionalist, individualistic, authoritarian ethical perspective. In this chapter, I will describe an ethic of care by comparing it to traditional moral education. I will also share several specific misconceptions about care that I have found need to be addressed in order to clarify care ethics for teacher preparation. Next, I suggest implications for teacher preparation for care ethics. Last, I put forward several pedagogies designed to teach care ethics in early childhood education. The relational perspective of care ethics has been applied to moral education . Nel Noddings, referred to as "the principal architect of the notion of education as caring" (DeStigter 2001: 302), grounds care ethics on the claim that care is a fundamental human need. Thus, our desire to be in caring relationship with one another could motivate us to learn to relate more effectively than a set of dicta based on a body of knowledge. Rather than imposing virtues or rules externally, in care ethics, moral growth occurs through the experience of enduring, reciprocal, and responsive relationships . Ethical caring is determining another's needs and responding to those needs in relationships; such caring involves engrossing oneself in another's needs in order to respond to the need. In contrast, traditional moral education focuses on rules with rewards and punishments to extrinsically motivate; this approach neglects the social motivation to teach morals (Kohn , 1999a. When moral education is not grounded in the recognition of caring as an innate inclination, caring must be dictated through rules rather than cultivated through experience. Rules travel with consequences, rewards, and competition. By dictating caring, educators may miss the opportunity to draw out childrens' desire for connection. Without cultivating this inclination, children learn to require rules about how to treat one another. Care ethics goes against the grain in a western individualistic society . Individualism cultivates competitive, isolationalist dispositions . In school, one child's success defines another's failure. In stories, heroes and heroines develop strength against their social context and vanquish alone. Interestingly, despite this endemic individualism, for decades psychology has demonstrated our innate propensity to empathize with one another (Bowlby 1969(Bowlby /1982;;, even in infants (Spokes

This article addresses how developing caring relations with students at a community col- lege effectively supports students’ needs and ultimately success. At the same time, I dis- cuss my own personal dilemmas while creating relationships that focus on students’ needs. I use Nel Noddings’ ethic of care theory to discuss how her ideas and the idea of others have challenged me to think about and develop an ethic of care enriched by my own teaching and interactions with my students. In this paper, I use three vignettes to il- lustrate: the profound difference caring can have on one student; sometimes one’s caring will lead a student to remove herself from academe; and the power of caring in terms of community. I conclude cautiously, knowing that the demands involved in developing car- ing relations is complicated by the needs of many: the students’, my own and the institu- tions’.

2014

The purpose of this study is to examine why teachers sometimes struggle to develop caring relationships with their students, despite their intention to do so. In order to do this, the notion of caring relationships (Mayeroff, 1971) is explored, as well as the influence of teachers’ emotions on these dynamics. The study also examines environmental factors in schools that influence the development of caring teacher-student relationships. In all, fourteen teachers with early, middle, and senior years teaching experience participated in two focus-groups each, and seven of these participants were subsequently interviewed individually. Because this study adopts a grounded theory approach, the coding of data is foundational to the ongoing data analysis. More specifically, open coding (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser, 1978), followed by focused (Charmaz, 2006), and selective coding (Glaser, 1978) are used to not only identify the emergent categories in the collected data, but how they interrelate wit...

Reimagining the Academy, 2021

In 2019 we-Madeleine and Samantha-came together with a few invited colleagues to workshop and discuss the relationship between care and initial teacher education (ITE). Our colleagues participated to support our research project, for which we had set the questions: What work are universities and their academics doing to care for their students and to prepare graduates to contribute meaningfully to caring cultures? What is the value-actual and ongoing-to universities in having staff who create communities of care? To workshop these questions, we arranged tea, coffee, and biscuits and invited our colleagues to share with us their experiences of joining an academic community, teaching in the

Eğitim Ve İnsani Bilimler Dergisi: Teori Ve Uygulama, 2016

McCroskey (1992) noted that when teachers motivated students by caring for them, students interpreted it as an act of inspiring them in positive ways of displaying empathy, understanding, and responsiveness. Teachers earn greater respect from students. In fact, teachers can manage a positive classroom environment by helping students to be self-disciplined in class. Students learn how to be self-disciplined, supportive, and encouraging to one another by teachers modeling desired caring behaviors (Noddings, 2005). When a positive classroom environment is established, students agree to cooperate with teachers and peers creating a community of learners (Brown, 2004). In turn, students will demonstrate their ability to perform to the high expectations of their teachers. In this paper, exercising teacher caring as a proactive measure to diminish student misbehavior is initiated as a strategy to prepare students to become self-disciplined to achieve positive classroom management, which directly impacts the classroom learning environment Noddings (2005) contented that until our students believe they are cared for and learn to care for others, they will not achieve academic success. Teacher caring behaviors Garza (2009) stated that a construct that may create a more positive school climate for students is the "ethic of care". Teacher caring behaviors are purposeful actions exhibited by teachers who are passionate enough about the well-being of their students to invest ample time and effort to ensure student success. As characterized by Gay (2000), teacher caring behaviors refer to "patience, persistence, facilitation, validation, and empowerment" (p. 49). Other attributes are trust, respect, and

Social studies and the young learner, 2009

Jennifer was anxious, yet excited about the upcoming school year. A beginning teacher, she had a classroom to organize. There were desks to arrange, learning centers to create, and posters to affix to the walls. Jennifer also needed to prioritize her teaching and learning goals for the coming year. She realized the value of bringing thoughtful social studies to the forefront of her second grade classroom. Jennifer wanted a classroom that would nurture emerging citizens. She hoped that, if she created a caring classroom environment: