student physical and psychological safety and promotes engagement and learning.
Of course, these several explanations can be bound together to provide a robust understanding of how caring works. An important additional point is that the outcomes of caring are best understood in terms of the totality of caring—the systems of caring—that persons experience across settings, including family and friendship networks, schools, churches, and other institutions. Histories of caring or noncaring relationships and experiences are important also. Systems of caring are dynamic, and their elements likely influence each other. For example, while the close relationships students have with family, teachers, and close peers may affect them most, relationships with other adults in extended families, schools, and communities and with other peers will also have an effect. Elements of a system of caring relationships may be differentially strong, weak, or absent for different students. Caring may be particularly strong for some students in family and community but weak or absent in school—or vice versa. The strength of caring in some relationships may compensate for weakness in others. Again, it is the totality of caring that is important.
Caring can have important benefits for the ones caring—in our case school leaders as well as teachers and other staff. It can lead to joy and personal and professional satisfaction and fulfillment. It can increase self-esteem, motivation, agency, persistence, and overall mental health. These positive outcomes can, in turn, enhance the prospects of ongoing and deeper caring. The experience of caring can lead to more caring as it satisfies a sense of personal and professional calling. It can propel a virtuous cycle of caring.
Influence of Contexts
Several related contexts can affect caring and its outcomes positively or negatively (see Figure 0.3). Noddings observes that caring occurs in and through social relationships that constitute an interpersonal context.16 Most conducive to caring are interpersonal contexts that are enduring; that are personally deep, open, honest, and revealing; that are characterized by trust; and in which attention is given both to the present and how the present relates to the past and the future. In interpersonal contexts that are shorter in duration, are more shallow, are lacking in transparency and honesty, grow from mistrust, or fail to acknowledge the past or consider the future, caring is less likely to form and grow.
16Noddings (2013).
Figure 0.3 Surrounded by Care. Nicholas Fogg, Grade 12
Organizational contexts can also enable or impede caring. Particularly relevant to caring in schools are structures that create opportunities for students, teachers, principals, and other staff to interact and learn about each other; to form long-term, deep, and trusting relationships; and to engage in caring action and interaction. These structures include the ordering of programs, goals, roles, responsibilities, and relationships. They include the organization of time and work, systems of social and academic support, as well as academic press—performance expectations and means of accountability. They also include incentives and rewards that can direct attention and action toward caring.
In addition to structural elements, school organizational climate and culture can affect caring. By climate we refer to the perceptions that students, teachers, and administrators have of each other, of their relationships, and of the school as a place for caring and learning. Particularly important to caring and other supportive behavior is how students and adults perceive the ethical climate of the school. A school’s organizational culture—that is, its system of orientations, taken-for-granted assumptions, and values as well as the symbols, rituals, and routines by which they are communicated—sets expectations for caring and establishes a foundation for mutual accountability in caring. Other aspects of organizational context can be important for caring in schools. Power and authority relationships and processes of school decision-making create conditions that can support or impede caring. How a school balances collective and individual interests and how it engages in competitive and adversarial or consensual and constructive politics can be important to caring. Also relevant is how a school may rely on consolidated or expansive and inclusive distribution of power and influence.
Beyond the school are extraorganizational contexts that can affect systems of caring. These contexts include families, communities, and broad policy and social-historical-cultural environments. Notable are social resources in families and communities and characteristics of the broader environment. Norms and values that emphasize the individual, such as independence, self-sufficiency, competition, and individual success, are less supportive of caring than those that emphasize community, such as interdependence, cooperation, and collective responsibility and accountability. In communities, resources for caring include social-emotional support from peers and from nonparent adults, such as relatives, family friends, and neighbors. Opportunities for caring and support can also come through community organizations and the resources and services they can provide. These include civic organizations, recreational and youth development programs, health care and social support services, religious congregations, businesses, and local government. Economic and political forces, crime and violence, racism and other forms of oppression, and population instability can mitigate these community resources and caring generally.
Problems and Pitfalls
Caring does not always function in a straightforward or positive manner, even when it is enacted with the best intentions. Boundaries must be negotiated. Relationships need to be monitored and managed. Caring can cause embarrassment and make persons feel vulnerable. If not careful, caring can evoke a sense of obligation that is inappropriate or impossible to fulfill. Caring can also lead to objectification—people can be seen as inanimate problems to solve and relationships can become contrived.
Moreover, acting on particular virtues can create dilemmas as one virtue may bump up against another. According to education ethics scholars Joan Shapiro and Jacqueline Stefkovich, such dilemmas present ethical choices to be managed.17 For example, caring can create tension between acting in the best interests of an individual student and abiding by the rules and policies of the school or district. Acting in the best interests of individuals and groups can create tensions with the interests of the whole and with values of fairness and equal treatment of all.
17Shapiro and Stefkovich (2010).
Some virtues that drive caring can bring both benefits and unexpected problems at the same time. For example, psychologist Paul Bloom observes that empathy can be a positive force on how we act and interact with others by making it possible to resonate with their positive and negative feelings.18 At the same time, empathy can be superficial and biased. It can set a cognitive trap by which presumptions can be reinforced to the detriment of another person. Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki contend that through empathy we feel happy when we vicariously share the joys of others and we feel pain when we share the suffering of others.19 Shared feelings of pain and suffering can be difficult, sometimes leading to stress and distress, which then can lead to negative feelings, withdrawal, antisocial behavior, blame, and burnout. To guard against this prospect, empathy must be linked with compassion—that is, to feelings of warmth, concern and care for another, and motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion directs empathic thinking toward positive action and helps avoid empathy’s pitfalls and problems.
18Bloom (2018).
19Singer and Klimecki (2014).
Caring can lead to unintended and potentially harmful consequences. For the ones caring, it can be extremely demanding and psychologically, emotionally, and physical stressful. Caring can result in what communications scholars Katherine Kinnick, Dean Krugman, and Glen Cameron call compassion fatigue, the emotional overload that occurs when one gets overinvolved,
