Strand 4 TBTS: Critical Care

Critical Care: Thinking Behind the Strand

An ethic of critical care actively nurtures and contextualizes complex relationships to responsibly work in solidarity with and for all students, their families, and communities.

Creating a caring environment and relationships with our students asks us to see students as people and children first, to show empathy and consideration, to honor their experiences, and to let ourselves be touched and changed by our relationships with them. Caring for our students translates into meaningful interpersonal relationships, instructional choices, and willingness to move outside of our comfort zones. Importantly, showing care does not equate to engaging in relationships with students that are inappropriate, misguided, harmful, or unprofessional.

Showing care

Students recognize care when they feel it from a teacher. Ask any student, at any age, and they can identify when a teacher genuinely cares for them. Care is present when a child feels cared for. Younger and older children alike can describe when caring feels authentic or real. Youth describe caring teachers as people who show concern for how they are and what they do; who don’t yell at them, but do make it clear they are not going to give up on them; who express an interest in their well-being and how things in the world are treating them. Care can be as concrete as pronouncing a child’s name correctly (even when it is not one you are familiar with and is difficult for you to pronounce at first), using their preferred pronouns, and organizing your classroom so a child is not disabled from taking part in learning. Care also manifests in how we talk about our students when they are not around or we don’t think they can hear us. Authentic care shows respect and acceptance. When kids feel that genuine interest in who they are from a teacher, respect and care become two-directional.

Teachers exhibit care for their students through connection, sharing pieces of themselves, joking around and being tough, listening and asking hard questions. And teachers show care through their pedagogical choices, the ways we structure our curriculum and what we choose to teach. Care becomes complex when we consider varying cultural norms or personal preferences of exhibiting care. Social and professional contexts further complicate the ways we show and recognize care. Yet we have to be self-aware in our caring: showing regular approval and leniency for some students while at the same time ignoring or being sarcastic to others communicates a discriminatory care, affording privilege to some and relegating others to second-class status. As teachers, we have to ask ourselves, do I provide positive feedback to all of my students or only those who get good grades? Or only those who are compliant? Do I let kids know that I care for them, whether they perform well academically or not? How do I show a student I care for them, even when they’ve made a mistake? Although a teacher may insist on giving positive comments to each student about academic achievement, some students may still say that their teacher cares about their grades but not about them.

Care and resilience

Resilience is when we keep trying for something when things are tough and are met with obstacles. Although resilience is often talked about as an individual character trait, resilience can be seen across entire communities—groups of people who refuse to give up, be moved, or be silenced, regardless of the pressure placed on them to acquiesce, conform, or disappear. When individuals show resilience, sometimes they turn inward and often they turn to others they know they can rely on. These people, oftentimes teachers, provide support in ways they need to persevere.

What does a disposition of care have to do with resilience? Research tells us that kids who have authentic, caring relationships with adults who play significant roles in their lives (outside of school and inside of school) are more resilient than those who do not such relationships. Youth are able to draw on this resilience to overcome difficult circumstances. For some students, care provides a sense of support, assuring them they can persevere, even though things might be tough in the moment. Teachers can be that caring adult who fortifies students’ resilience. In other instances, teachers must recognize the resilience students draw upon to come to school and make it through, even though they feel marginalized, silenced, misrepresented, or isolated. Caring teachers can recognize the range of resilience students have had to develop depending on their circumstances, draw on the resilience students already have, strengthen their networks of resilience and belief in themselves, support them in applying their resilience to new situations, and do what they can to mitigate the need for some students to have to be disproportionately resilient than others. In other words, caring teachers must find ways to use their influence to make schools places where youth do not need to be as resilient, rather than simply praising them for their resilience.

Critical caring practice

Care does not end at relationship building. Our learning spaces can, and should, also be places where “critical care” is felt. Critical care recognizes that social, historical, and political contexts have not, and do not, treat each of us the same. Recognizing the realities of different lived experiences and taking seriously the desire in each of us to live a life that is healthy and fulfilling calls for critical care for all of our students. This includes a willingness to accept different perspectives and experiences, undertake difficult conversations, acknowledge blind spots and ways we may be causing harm, and change our thinking and practices to create circumstances where all of our students have opportunities for deep learning and self-determination. Showing critical care can also include speaking up, standing in solidarity with, and acting against policies and actions that are not in the best interest of a student or group of students—particularly those who come from communities that have experienced marginalization and inequitable school practices.

As teachers, we also must include self-care as part of our professional regimen: time to just be, to restore ourselves and re-energize for the next day, semester, and year, so that we can be our best teacher selves for the young people who rely on us.

Care can be elusive to gauge. However, in order for caring to be meaningful and move beyond superficiality and sentimentality, it is important to think through the different dimensions of care as a practice (Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Tronto, 1993). Caring includes: (1) attention of needs; (2) recognition of responsibility to give care; (3) the actual giving of care; (4) an evaluation of the effectiveness of care received; and (5) trust and solidarity. It is important to develop specific behaviors, processes and language around care.

Attention of needs (caring about) is being able to take up an open stance in relation to the student(s). We must be reflexive of our working assumptions of practice to better understand and interpret students’ interests, lives, and experiences and real-time situations. We must elicit this information continually in practice go beyond good intentions (e.g., actively ask our students questions and addressing concerns in a timely fashion).

Recognition of responsibility (caring for): As teachers, we must understand that our students have dynamic, multiple, and varied needs. We should be proactive to care for students by helping them foster self-efficacy and resilience. We also have a responsibility to foster sociopolitical consciousness with our students and to work toward equipping them with the tools to address systemic and historical inequities engendered by multiple and intersecting oppressions.

Giving of care (competence): For care to be effective, we must demonstrate knowledge, skills, and relational acumen in flexible ways. Our caregiving must be to our students’ contexts and address the specific needs of students, especially those living in extenuating circumstances.

Responsiveness of care (care receiving): Teachers should find opportunities to appraise the effectiveness of caregiving from their students in order to assure that caring is a reciprocal practice. We should also take up self-care strategies.

Solidarity and trust (caring with): Teachers, over time, acknowledge that solidarity and trust among students, families, and community members emerge through multiple acts of care, thus extending the efficacy of care.

The trouble with caring

The absence of a caring relationship with students is evident in teaching and learning through the absence of a trusting classroom community. Sometimes we struggle to cultivate positive relationships with certain students. We are all human and this can happen for a number of reasons. Finding a connection we can have with one another can take time and energy and may include feelings of failure, frustration, and structural constraints:

● “There isn’t enough time in the day.”

● “We’re expected to cover so much content, it doesn’t leave space for building relationships.”

● “I’m under so much scrutiny. People say if I’m focused on being my students’ friend, the kids can’t be learning much.”

● “Let’s be honest, the students are never going to like me as much as my colleague.”

● “What if they don’t respect me because I come off as too nice?”

Although it is difficult to face, sometimes we struggle to show care for particular students because we are unable or unwilling to. This can be linked to our own identities or insecurities, and our implicit biases about a child’s identities and abilities.