Sharing the Burden of Care: Explorations Into the Role of Technology, Pedagogy, and the Learning Community

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

Abstract

Introduction and Purpose
Over the years, teachers across classrooms have practiced caring relations in various ways. Such caring relations between teachers and students fosters a desire to learn and provides students with a sense of belonging conducive to learning (O’Keeffe, 2013). While caring is universally practiced, the nuances of caring relations in classrooms have only been recently explored (Authors, 2022b). Trauma around racial injustice compounding the pandemic crisis, expanded teachers’ care work further even as their resources dwindled. This care work, while critical, may have led to an increase in stress and burn out among teachers who are constantly being asked to do more.

Situated within a larger iterative design-based research study, the purpose of this inquiry is to investigate supports that can be offered to teachers’ caring practices while building on Noddings’ theories of relational care (Noddings, 2010). Specifically, the study describes and analyzes the curriculum enactments, technological supports, and the role of a learning community in practicing collective care.

Theoretical Framework
Guided by Noddings (2010) Framework of Moral Education, caring is characterized in our study by the ways in which it is experienced. Care is further experienced at four levels: care for the self, care for the other, care for the community and care for the world (Authors, 2023b). Each level of care is interconnected, forming a holistic approach to care that values student and teacher well-being, interpersonal relationships, community growth, and global good. Embedding care pedagogies in the classroom at these four levels provides new opportunities for collective reflective and generative practice. It also provides ways to affirm and support a student’s identity in the community while taking collective responsibility for caring for the self, the other, the community and the world.

Methods & Data Sources
Applying an ethnographic case-study approach (Fusch et al., 2017), this study analyzed classroom practices, technological supports, and strategies in three high school classrooms during the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school year. Per guidelines offered by Creswell (2014) for qualitative research, we engaged in: preparing and organizing the data, reducing the data into themes through a process of coding and finally representing the data visually to facilitate a discussion around it with the teacher, their students, and others.

Results
Coding interview transcripts revealed that caring practices centered around active learning strategies used in the classroom. This included show and tell, just-in-time teaching, demonstrations and whole-class structured brainstorming. Integrative analytics dashboards provided key functionality to help the teacher understand student emotions, interactions, confidence, openness, and learning. Students also shared the importance of customized technology supports in the classroom and discussed the role of intelligent agents in caring.

Scholarly Significance
Awareness surrounding the need for caring in classrooms is growing; however, the dominant narrative around care in education focuses on the role of the teacher. Instead, the narrative needs to change to reflect the fact that caring is a collective and shared endeavor.

Authors

• Preeti Raman, Toronto Metropolitan University

• Lynda Yearwood, Upper Canada College