Rethinking Care in a Time of Crisis: Preparing Teachers Amid a Global Pandemic

• In Event: Learning Discussion Facilitation Online: Foregrounding Care and Equity in Online Practice-Based Teacher Education Courses

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
2020 was a challenging year to be a teacher educator (TE) and a teacher candidate (TC). Courses were moved online as a result of COVID-19. TEs had to rethink how they taught their courses to accommodate challenges TCs faced, such as caring for older loved ones who contracted or eventually died from COVID, or the challenge of becoming homeless for several weeks because of lost employment resulting from COVID shutdowns.

While TEs always strive to support TCs who struggle to balance coursework, school placements, and home life demands, this past “pandemic year” has accentuated and exacerbated the inequities TCs grappled with. As a result, TEs have been forced to reassess what it means to care for their TCs to ensure they received enough preparation to be successful in the classroom, let alone complete their program. In this presentation, we explore ways prior conceptions of care might be insufficient, both during and beyond a pandemic, to provide TCs with the social and emotional support they need to be successful novice teachers.

Theoretical Framework:
We leverage and extend Noddings’ (2012) work on care and “care ethics” by focusing on a mix of modeling, listening, and vulnerability as specific teaching strategies we used to address TCs’ “expressed needs” (Noddings, 2012) and to support them through a year of virtual teacher preparation. Noddings (2012) describes the caring educator as “interested in the expressed needs of the cared-for, not simply the assumed needs” as framed by either the educator or the school or the coursework (p. 772). Given the severity of challenges some TCs faced as a result of the COVID pandemic, prioritizing their expressed needs, sometimes to the detriment of what the TE assumed TCs needed, took on greater urgency and necessity.

Methods and Data:
We draw from data collected by a larger team of TEs working in institutions across the country. Our data reflect a subset of a larger data corpus, specifically TC focus group transcripts, to explore the ways we have rethought what it means to care for TCs, including how to implement “care ethics” (Noddings, 2012) in our virtual ELA methods courses and what impact those actions may have had on our TCs’ ability to navigate our courses.

Results:
Findings suggest TCs noted the following positive expressions of care that impacted their learning: 1) TEs’ ability to model flexibility and adaptability, 2) TEs’ ability to listen to student needs and make accommodations and modifications for teacher candidates in the course, and 3) TEs’ ability to be vulnerable with their teacher candidates.

Significance:
Despite the uniqueness of the social-political context of 2020 that included a pandemic and public demonstrations for greater racial justice, we argue that specific teaching strategies that express greater care for TCs may also be beneficial to how successful they will be in their programs and how they think about their role as new teachers.

Authors

• Paul S Sutton, Pacific Lutheran University

• Rebecca Smith, University of Portland

• Gavin Tierney, California State University - Fullerton