Designing a New Practice of Care in Teacher Education: Co-Constructing Care in Post-COVID Learning Environments

• In Event: Revisioning Care in the Pursuit of Educational Equity

Abstract

Purpose
In this paper, we explore the construct of care within Teacher Education during and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work (Authors, 2022a) examined how the context of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted how we consider and define the elements of care. Through our examination of literature and our data analysis, we identified the need to adopt a framework for sociopolitical care that centers issues of equity, power, positionality, with a recognition that certain cultures, relationships, and communities are often marginalized in normative frameworks of care.

Perspectives
Research studies that focus on critical care for students utilize a variety of terminology. Rector-Aranda (2018) calls for teacher education programs to integrate critically compassionate intellectualism (CCI), which combines critical pedagogy, authentic caring, and social justice curriculum. Roberts (2010) calls for culturally relevant critical teacher care (CRCTC), which integrates tenets of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) and critical race theory. This framework entails a focus on students’ voices, counternarratives, and student futures, in addition to a consideration of political and ideological thinking, especially related to race and power (Roberts, 2010). Additionally, research from indigenous and native scholars (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Holmes & Gonzalez, 2017; Sabzalian, 2019) suggest care for students should be centered within a broader, community-focused ecosystem.

Methodology
Building upon previous research (Authors, 2022a) that analyzed care across teacher education institutions, researchers analyzed gaps in literature related to the sociopolitical context of care needed to authentically teach and learn in teacher education. Thus, we developed the proposed theoretical revision to relational pedagogies to help guide our own practice and to encourage like-minded educators in their practice.

Results
We present three initial design principles for reimagining care within teacher education.
Principle 1: Care is a collaborative process. Acts of care are more than the actions of an individual teacher to an individual student; authentic caring involves a collaborative process between students, students and teachers, students and the community, and teachers and the community.
Principle 2. Care involves vulnerability. A collaborative version of care requires a particular kind of humility, trust, and vulnerability from the classroom teacher. To make this shift, teachers de-center themselves and share responsibility for the wellbeing of the student with those caretakers outside the school building.
Principle 3. Care is co-constructed. An ethic of care must be co-constructed by teachers, students, and the community. In particular, the teacher education classroom can mitigate normative power dynamics, drawing from the same principles of co-constructed, de-settled, and decolonized communities by co-constructing a caring teacher education classroom space with students and making space for them to bring in their myriad identities and lived experiences.

Significance
This paper highlights the need for teachers to listen to the expressed needs of their students, particularly as those needs relate to the sociopolitical context of the time. Care entails co-construction of learning between the teacher, the student, and the broader community and system of support that surrounds the student, revisioning Noddings’ (1988) framework to be more inclusive and racially conscious.

Authors

• Gavin Tierney, California State University - Fullerton

• Paul S Sutton, Pacific Lutheran University

• Rebecca Smith, University of Portland