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Caring Teachers

Reference: Noddings, N. (2001). 'The caring teacher.' In Richardson, V (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Noddings asks, 'What does it mean to be a caring teacher?' She advises that caring manifests itself in many ways, and differs across cultures, occupations and situations. A teacher might be tough on one student and permissive with another, and in both cases be caring. Noddings draws a distinction between caring as a feeling and the hard intellectual and managerial work of teaching.

The word 'caring' can, of course, be used to refer to an attitude, but it can also be used to describe a relation or point to something far deeper and more important - a way of being in the world. (p. 99)

Characteristics of a caring encounter include:

attentiveness
receptiveness
motivational displacement
response
care acknowledgment.

Anyone who has taught feels the importance of this cycle: the receptivity and motivational displacement, the outflow of motive energy (sometimes repeated to the point of fatigue), the responsive grin, a spark in the student's eye, a spurt of growth, or a courteous gesture toward a fellow student - some sign that the caring has been completed. Without such signs, teachers become exhausted or, in today's language, 'burned out'. (p. 100)

Noddings refers to difficulties in notions of caring, such as the historical relationship between women's work and caring, and whether caring is a one-way action from carer to cared-for or a reciprocal interaction between carer and cared-for.

By considering caring as relational, a failure of caring may then be traced to the carer, the cared-for or the situation. Thus, this view allows us to look beyond the virtue of the carer.

The caring teacher … is not best construed as one who possesses certain stable, desirable traits that might be identified before she steps into a classroom. Rather, a caring teacher is someone who has demonstrated that she can establish, more or less regularly, relations of care in a wide variety of situations. This approach reminds us, too, that a teacher who fails in one situation may succeed in another, and vice versa. (pp. 100-101)

Also, a relational view of caring insists that the reaction of the cared-for is crucial, such that cruelty or self-righteousness in the name of caring, but which is rejected by the cared-for, requires close scrutiny.

Conceptualising caring as more than a nice feeling - as a reciprocal reaction that wants and is recognised as being the best for the cared-for - has implications for professional teaching practice. Caring implies a continuous drive for competence and growth, on the part of both the carer and the cared-for. There are conflicts: between intimacy and professional aloofness; between ordinary language and professional language; and between closeness and more distanced supervision.

Noddings writes that care in teaching requires attention to the relationships between teachers and students and also to the settings in which teachers work. In particular, administrators can facilitate or hinder teachers' ability to care.

Administrators can encourage caring by both respecting teachers' efforts to care and by modelling care … [and especially using] the power of conversation. (p. 103)