Caring teacher and sensitive student: is it a gender issue in the university context?

ABSTRACT

While there is abundant scholarship discussing gendered discourse on care in early childhood and compulsory education, little exploration has been made to explore whether care might also be gendered in higher education. This article, based on data from a year-long narrative study, examines the conceptualisation of care and its effects on teaching and learning in the university context with a gender lens. It on the one hand reveals an implicit but persistent feminine ethic of care in the university context, and on the other hand delivers the hope of developing an ethic of care that values and de-genders care in universities with the demonstration of agency in the two sensitive students.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethic of care
• care in opposition to justice
• care as relation
• care as practice and value
• higher education
• narrative inquiry