Breaking Out of Color-Blind Care: Navigating Care Conflicts in the Work of Reengaging Dropout Youth

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Defending Democracy in Schools: Rethinking Privilege and Color Blindness

Abstract

While educators agree that caring is important in learning, less agreement exists on how care should be enacted. Colorblind care can harm students of color, and yet without explicit conversations about race-conscious caring, well-intentioned educators may engage in care practices that reproduce inequalities. Drawing on black womanist care theory and three years of ethnographic fieldwork at a public charter school designed to prepare dropout and disconnected youth for college, this paper adds to the literature on race-conscious care. We argue that social location shapes approaches to care and how care is perceived. Educators must interrogate the ideologies that drive theories of caring and problematize their understandings of care in order to avoid harming the very students they wish to help.

Authors

• Jennifer Buehler, Saint Louis University

• Lauren Rea Preston, Saint Louis University