Week Four Theory to Practice

I spent a lot of time this week thinking about care from Nel Noddings' perspective. She approaches teaching with a pedagogy based on the deepest and richest human emotion-love. While I know that I want love and care to be a part of my pedagogy and have included it in my philosophy of education, Noddings caused me to really think about what that actually looks like in my classroom. Previously I thought about it more long the lines of "I will care and therefore my students will know that I care." I had not considered the power of the care. As I said last week, when teachers are aware of their students' (and their own) emotionality, they can foster security, and inspire intrinsic motivation. But this seems to be somewhat clinical and more passive than I would hope for the application of my care.

Noddings (2005) sees care as the reflective and reflexive relatedness between student and teacher that is nurtured and attended to to ensure understanding and the readiness to learn. Noddings' concept of care breaks down barriers to learning like the dichotomy between desire for compliance and desire for non-compliance, instilling in students (through an extrinsic source) an intrinsic desire to learn. I was kind of blown away by this idea, that one could change a student's whole approach to school and to learning simply by letting her know that you care about her by and asking for reciprocal care.

Further, that this care is not passive in the giving or the taking means that both sides assume a responsibility to the ongoing attention of the relationship, which makes each accountable to the other and allows for the individualized understanding of the student. The student will feel cared about and will allow the teacher to know and understand her better which allows the teacher to teach her in the most effective way possible.

Noddings goes even further when she says that the teacher can take her individualized understanding of students and create curriculum, lessons, assessments and discussions that are both born of the care relationship, informed by the care relationship and affirm the relationship on an ongoing basis.

I know this is somewhat far-reaching and that not every student will be open to the care relationship or benefit from it to this degree, but I also know that I know what I (the carer) can do in the classroom to try to bring about the care/cared for relatedness. To me, this is the great privilege of teaching, that teachers are allowed to reach students at an emotional level that allows genuine insight into the educational needs of that student and allows the teacher to individualize teaching.