Caring Instructors

This week, some of us are celebrating and/or enjoying holidays of Thanksgiving, Native American Heritage Day or perhaps Black Friday. I would like to share a relatively recent article entitled, “Constructing the caring higher education teacher” by Walker and Gleaves (2016). This study seeks to theorize ‘the caring teacher’ in the context of the higher education environment. The study was carried out from the perspective of the teachers concerned and adopted an inductive interpretive paradigm. Emergent categories comprised:

a relationship at the center;
compelled to care;
caring as resistance; and
caring as less than.

The central concept was that a caring instructor places ‘a relationship at the center’ and the conceptual narrative was teachers' enduring belief that caring could be enacted through particular forms of relationship and in turn, that it would lead ultimately to more effective learning environments. This is a significant finding considering that there is research to link caring with learning outcomes within higher education (Mariskind, 2014). These teachers' beliefs that students are being empowered, being made intellectually richer because of their particular types of interactions with them, agrees with research that such relationships are valued (Hagenauer & Volet, 2014).

Data was collected and analyzed for ‘caring exemplifiers’ of:

Listening to students
Showing empathy
Supporting students
Actively fostering learning in class
Giving appropriate and encouraging feedback and praise
Having high expectations in standards of work and behavior
Showing an active concern in students' personal lives

Sample questions for the instructors included:

What factors do you think were commonly used in identifying you as a caring teacher? (Common factors will be shared with the participant). Do you recognize yourself in them? How?
Do you personally consider caring to be an intrinsic part of your teaching or academic work? How?
What differences, if there are any, could you identify in yourself, according to your experience, between when you knowingly care about your students, and when you're not conscious of it?

A major finding was the ability of caring teachers to interpret and translate diverse principles and motivations for caring, into specific practices that encompassed accepted practices of pedagogic caring, including trust, reciprocity, authenticity, reflexivity, responsiveness and attentiveness. As a result, if caring teaching affects the environment in which students learn, as well as impacting clearly upon the teachers practicing this care, then it is a critically important agenda for further research.

References

Walker, C., & Gleaves, A. (2016). Constructing the caring higher education teacher: A theoretical framework, Teaching and Teacher Education, (54), 65-76, ISSN 0742-051X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.11.013