The Southwest Florida region experienced COVID-19 and a major hurricane between 2020 and 2022. The increase in major emergencies, which are often unpredictable, can be highly distressing for those affected. This phenomenological study describes the lived experiences of academics through these two significant traumatic events and explores the…

Being an educator can be both challenging and rewarding. Teaching requires skill, commitment, relationship, and stamina. Occupational standards within education consistently set high expectations for teachers without concretely promoting self-care. When a teacher's stress and burdens continuously outweigh their ability to care for themselves,…

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2020 to explore the potential of open educational resources (OER) to reduce textbook costs for students at smaller and mid-sized independent colleges and universities, especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other…

In light of recent political events in the United States, and with the urging to consider Noddings' care ethics in early childhood education, this conceptual piece considers an often-overlooked question in political discourse: what are the rights of the child, and how might these be centered in discussions of pedagogy, curricula, and legislation?…

The instructor-student relationship may be understood as an educational helping relationship. Through interviews with 15 participants enrolled in masters or doctoral programs in education, this qualitative study explored graduate students' perceptions of educational helping instructor-student relationships over the entirety of their higher…

Today's students will face issues and problems that are global scale and require a collaborative global effort to resolve effectively. To help prepare students to resolve these global issues, students must learn to participate in the global democratic process as part of their citizenship education. In particular, scholars argue students need to…

This article focuses on self-identified Spanish-speaking early childhood educators' experiences with and views of bilingualism as they learned about translanguaging--a dynamic, liberatory, and culturally and linguistically sustaining theory and practice of language. Artifacts and conversations with teachers showed that, counter to many of their…

Students who experience teacher caring and high expectations (i.e., warm demand) are typically more engaged and successful at school. Yet, relative to White students, students of color tend to report lower levels of school social belonging and more distant relationships with their White teachers. Leveraging data from 179 6th-9th grade Measures of…

The public education landscape has changed dramatically since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Communities and school systems throughout the country have faced unimaginable consequences from this public health crisis and the disruption to K-12 public schools. The pandemic's disproportionate impact on low-income communities of color, along with…

Sense of belonging is an essential element of a high-quality 4-H program. However, little research exists quantifying sense of belonging among 4-H club members. We measured perceived sense of belonging among Florida 4-H members in middle and high school as well as seven factors that influenced continued participation in 4-H. Parental involvement,…

This article explores the Opt Out Florida (OOF) movement, a predominantly woman-led group seeking to dismantle neoliberal education policy by coaching children to boycott high-stakes standardized tests. Guided by Campbell's assertion that neoliberalism will never disappear without a "gender revolution" and Noddings's belief that those…

This comparative case study examines the prevalence of caring practices in two higher performing and two lower performing urban high schools and the contextual factors that helped or hindered the extent to which students felt cared for. We found that higher performing schools demonstrated caring communities, where interpersonal relationships and…

Using student survey data from six U.S. school districts, we estimate how assignment to a demographically similar teacher affects student reports of personal effort, happiness in class, feeling cared for and motivated by their teacher, the quality of student-teacher communication, and college aspirations. Relying on a classroom fixed-effects…

The purpose of this study was to explore connections among perceived caring climate, empathy, and student social behaviors in high school bands. Nine high school band directors (N = 9 schools), along with their students (N = 203), completed an electronic questionnaire for variables of caring climate, cognitive empathy, affective empathy, social…

All classrooms are active social systems; the middle school classroom involves complex interactions between and among peers as well as between students and teachers. In the elementary years, attention is often given to nurturing students and fostering relationships, yet when young adolescents transition to the middle school, a focus on control and…