The call to teach and the ethics of care: a dynamic educational crossroads

ABSTRACT

This philosophical and field-based article draws together two conceptions of teaching that have not been linked, as yet, in the scholarly literature: teaching as a calling or vocation, and teaching as the enactment of care ethics. We draw upon Hansen’s extensive work on calling and juxtapose it with Quek’s recent work on care ethics in teaching. While differences exist between the concepts calling and caring, with respect to the work of a teacher, we conclude that no adequate account of the practice can do without them.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching
• ethics
• teachers
• care
• calling

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Ninni Wahlstrom and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice about the structuring of this article. We wish to dedicate our joint endeavor to the memory of Professor Nel Noddings, whose work on the ethics of care has been a generative and inspiring influence on us both.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. By prior agreement, all names in this article–with the exception of the name of participating teacher Nancy–are pseudonyms.

2. As part of her dissertation research, Quek conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight public school teachers in Spring 2021 to find out how these teachers experienced and made sense of their endeavours in caring for students in schools. These teachers had between three and eighteen years of teaching experience and represented a range of grades, subjects, and geographical areas in the U.S. The conversational structure for the interviews mirrored Seidman’s (2006, p. 17) phenomenological-based, in-depth, three-part interview model which has the first interview establishing the participant’s life history and context, the second focusing on their contemporary experience, and the third asking them to reflect on the meaning that their experience holds for them. In posing conversational topics pertaining to the place of caring in teaching, Quek offered participants some prompts to encourage them to elaborate, clarify, and reflect on their experiences (see, Quek, 2022b).

Hansen’s Person Project constituted a two-year-long endeavour featuring sixteen teachers from eight public schools in the same large, metropolitan area. A guiding question of the undertaking was: What does it mean to be a person in the role of teacher? Hansen, assisted by two doctoral students, and the sixteen teachers devoted twenty-one meetings over the two-year period to addressing this question. The inquiry also included systematic classroom visits and a series of individual interviews with each participant (details in Hansen, 2017, Hansen, 2021a, 2021b).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David T. Hansen

David T. Hansen is the Sue Ann and John L. Weinberg Professor in the Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research has addressed themes in teaching, in what it means to be a teacher, in cosmopolitanism and education, and in other domains of philosophy of education.

Yibing Quek

Yibing Quek received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include ethics, feminist theory, issues of care and social reproduction, teacher well-being, and education policy.