to their success in school. It is, as Noddings puts it, the “bedrock of all successful education.”6 Research repeatedly emphasizes the importance that students place on caring in schools to their engagement, conduct, and academic success. Studies have linked caring relationships with adults and peers to healthy brain development and cognitive and social-emotional functioning. Research has shown relationships between caring and a number of positive psychological states, including self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, safety, hope, and persistence. Caring is also associated with children’s capacities for resilience, sense of belonging, social-emotional development, and prosocial behaviors, such as cooperation, communication, empathy, and responsibility. These, in turn, enable academic learning and performance. In addition, caring can lead to more caring. Children and youth who experience caring from adults and peers are more likely to act in caring ways themselves.
6Noddings (2005, p. 27).
A third reason to care about caring is that the alternatives are unacceptable. Lack of caring or harmful uncaring can impede positive learning and development. Research, such as that by child psychiatrist Bruce Perry, indicates that lack of caring and support can negatively affect cognitive development and impede caring social behavior.7 It can negatively affect children’s ability to manage stress and form attachments with others. For students, lack of caring can lead to feelings of isolation, lack of attention, antisocial behavior, negative attitudes toward school, and poor academic engagement—all contributing to low academic achievement.
7Perry (2002).
A fourth reason to care about caring in schools is that we cannot assume that caring is a present and unproblematic quality of schooling. There is a paradoxical notion that caring is present and strong in schools because caring is what schools are supposed to do. Health and social care expert Ann Brechin calls this an assumption of “spontaneously occurring caring”8 that is not always borne out in student experience. Research shows that educators often see caring when students do not. Studies show that substantial portions of students do not see their schools as caring, encouraging environments. In fact, caring is highly variable in schools today, particularly for students of color, students of low socioeconomic backgrounds, low-performing students, and students placed at risk. Education researchers Maxine McKinney de Royston and her colleagues observe that positive teacher-student relationships are not the norm for African American male students.9
8Brechin (1998, p. 2).
9de Royston et al. (2017).
Ironically, the way in which most schools are organized makes caring problematic. Bureaucratic structures and hierarchical relationships, lack of resources, inconsistencies among programs and policies, and the stresses and strains these conditions impose restrict opportunity and create obstacles to meaningful, caring relationships in schools. Moreover, the approaches we have taken recently to improve schools, notably regimes of curricular specification, testing, and accountability, have made developing supportive caring relationships among adults and students all the more difficult.
What Do We Mean By Caring?
We use the word caring to represent qualities of relationships and of actions and interactions that exhibit concern, provide support, nurture, meet students’ needs, and promote their success and well-being. We distinguish between care and caring. Care refers to an action provided on behalf of another. According to occupational sociologists Pamela Abbott and Liz Meerabeau, when associated with particular vocations, such acts are considered professional care or caregiving.10 Acts of care are very important to address students’ needs and concern. To us, however, caring involves more. Caring is not only what one does but also why and how one does it. Caring involves the matter, manner, and motivation of care as well as its competent provision. It is a particular way of being in relationship with others. Caring involves observing and assessing; identifying with; and responding to the situations, needs, interests, and concerns of others. It involves expressing particular positive virtues such as compassion, empathy, and respect. Caring is driven by motivation to achieve the betterment of others.
10Abbott and Meerabeau (1998).
Caring is not simply caring about—that is, having concern or sentiment for someone or something. It is important to care about students and their success. However, it is another thing to be caring of them. According to Benner and journalist Suzanne Gordon, caring includes but goes beyond feelings of concern and sentiment to actions and interactions—practices—of being in relationship with others and achieving particular aims on their behalves.11 Psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman observes that caring means both worrying and actively doing something about those worries.12
11Benner and Gordon (1996).
12Kleinman (2019).
Caring is not defined by specific actions or interactions. Nor is it defined by a particular set of activities that are necessarily different from those in which one regularly engages. Caring is not necessarily another responsibility that adds to one’s job description and workload. All actions and interactions—all activities—can be viewed through a lens of caring. Again, caring, as we define it, is a quality of a relationship—the matter, manner, and motivation of personal and professional action and interaction.
What Makes Action and Interaction Caring?
From our study, we find three elements that together make actions and interactions caring: (1) the pursuit of particular aims, (2) the activation of positive virtues and mindsets, and (3) competent enactment (see Figure 0.2). These elements form a system of antecedents to caring. Each may have personal and professional dimensions. Moreover, the expression of these elements in caring action and interaction may be affected positively or negatively by a variety of interrelated contexts.
Figure 0.2 What Makes Action and Interaction Caring?
Aims of Caring
Caring is neither aimless nor agnostic in purpose. For actions and interactions to be caring, they must focus on achieving particular purposes. Caring aims to promote the functioning, general well-being, and success of others, as individuals and as groups. Caring addresses particular needs of others and promotes their interests. Caring aims to help others grow and flourish in their own right. Caring is sometimes framed as a response to pain, suffering, and trouble. But it can be proactive and an affirmative expression of joy and celebration. Caring can also be a worthwhile endeavor in itself.
Caring can aim to address particular needs, problems, and concerns. It can aim to achieve tangible benefits, the manner in which and the motivation by which they are provided being as important as the benefits themselves. These benefits can come from what we described earlier as care: particular services and provisions. Caring can aim to promote certain intangible benefits—social, psychological, emotional, and behavioral—that accrue from being in caring relationships and feeling cared for. Finally, caring can aim to promote further caring.
It is not difficult to think about particular aims of education that relate to caring. We consider the general purposes of schooling to provide for students’ safety and nurturance; support their learning, development, independence, self-reliance, prosocial relationships, and ability to function in and contribute to community; promote academic success and general well-being; and prepare students for work, further education, and citizenship.
Positive Virtues and
