This self-study describes my year-long investigation to create caring community in my fourth-grade classroom. An introspective and dialogic pedagogy of intention-setting revealed students' experiences of taken-for-granted uncaring. This window into students' experiences afforded me opportunities to model care. Intentionality, dialogue, and…

As a teacher educator, I sought to understand how to cultivate care ethics in my online teaching over a three-year period. Through surveys, student work, interviews, my course materials and teaching journal, and video-ed synchronous class sessions with seven cohorts of teacher candidates, the lenses of care ethics revealed particular challenges…

This study investigated what happened during the implementation of a co-teaching model for student-teaching from a relational perspective. When analyzed through the theoretical framework of care ethics, teacher-candidates and their mentor-teachers developed caring relationships, acknowledged and negotiated differential power dynamics, and…

This qualitative research project's overarching goal was to explore ways to help primary grade teacher candidates (re)kindle a conception of teaching as a moral enterprise involving ethical choices and enactment of one's values. In the context of a science methods course, we explored the research question: What happens to the commitments toward…

As teacher educators, the authors developed an assignment focused on care ethics to prepare teacher candidates to design classroom-management procedures aimed at cultivating caring community. The teacher candidates revised traditional classroom-management processes, such as class rules, into cocreated norms. They also designed original management…

The current sociopolitical context of schooling is positioning play as incongruous with children's academic learning. As a result, teacher educators must increasingly guide future early childhood professionals to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to become effective play advocates. This includes articulating the value of play across the…

Isolation is often a problem in online courses. In this qualitative study, we used care ethics perspectives to design the social organization of an online course to foster the development of robust collaborative professional relationships. Redesign focused on two areas. First, we centered all assignments on complex real-world problems. Second, we…

Due to the current focus on individual achievement in education, relational ethical stances, such as care ethics, are particularly important. To be prepared to teach care ethics, teachers need exposure to pedagogies that cultivate students' capacity to care. "Care" refers to the capacity to become aware of and attend to others'…

This study elucidates the role that authenticity--knowing and being one's self--plays in preservice teachers' introduction to care ethics in a multicultural urban context. In one teacher education program, in observations, interviews, and surveys, preservice teachers described that caring required authenticity to avoid complying with…

An ethic of care acknowledges the centrality of the role of caring relationships in moral education. Care ethics requires a conception of "care" that differs from the quotidian use of the word. In order to teach care ethics more effectively, this article discusses four interrelated ways that teachers' understandings of care differ…

The primary objective of this paper is to suggest a mechanism by which current trends in public education, in particular the rise of externally defined numerical metrics of achievement to define school success, operate to shape school policy, curriculum and practice. Here, we argue that the modern school's focus on the cognitive dimension of…

Teacher educators have a civic responsibility to prepare novice teachers to foster relationships across cultural, racial, and socioeconomic divides. Care ethics acknowledges this imperative and context's role in determining varied meanings of care. The voices of teachers of color can help us to understand the demands of care across differences.…

Through an examination of storytelling in the present context, this study addresses the teaching of moral education from the standpoint of care ethics. Through observations, interviews, and surveys in one school committed to care ethics, this study aims to show how the philosophical perspective of care ethics can inform practice. Teachers engaged…