May 1995

Over this magazine’s first several decades, contributing authors had very little to say about the interpersonal side of classroom instruction. Perhaps they simply took it for granted that teachers should care about their students and build a positive rapport with them. As Robert Nelson Bush (“Principles of successful teacher-pupil relationship”) noted in the March 1958 issue, the scholarship on teacher-student relationships was meager at best. And, he added, “much present advice for promoting successful relationships between teachers and pupils rests more upon partisan prejudices, current fetishes, and folklore rather than upon the results of rigorous research” (p. 273).

By the 1990s, however, Kappan authors had come to focus a great deal of attention on the nature and importance of interpersonal relationships in classrooms and schools. Writing in March 1995, Catherine Lewis, Eric Schaps, and Marilyn Watson (“Beyond the pendulum: Creating challenging and caring schools”) explained that the conversation in the education community had historically shifted between a single-minded focus on students’ academic development and concern for their emotional well-being. The better approach, they maintained, was to take a broader view, because, as their research had found, social, emotional, and intellectual growth were interconnected:

Students work harder, achieve more, and attribute more importance to schoolwork in classes in which they feel liked, accepted, and respected by the teacher and fellow students. The caring classroom is not one that avoids criticism, challenge, or mistakes. Rather, like a good family, it provides every member with a sense of being valued and important. This sense of belonging allows for lively, critical discussions and intellectual risk-taking. It provides an important source of motivation to do one’s best. (p. 552)

Two months later, in May 1995, Kappan devoted a special section to the topic of “Youth and caring.” In her introduction (“Prologue: Why we should care about caring”), guest editor Joan Lipsitz took the position that caring is essential not just to student learning, but to the proper functioning of society:

Without caring, individual human beings cannot thrive, communities become violent battlegrounds, the American democratic experiment must ultimately fail, and the planet will not be able to support life. The fact that schools are too frail a reed upon which to rest sole responsibility for fostering the humanity of the next generation does not relieve them of their obligation to play their essential part in this intergenerational drama. (p. 665)

Lipsitz explained that educational discourse tended to focus on control and accountability, rather than on caring. But, she asserted, caring need not stand in opposition to high standards of behavior and academic achievement:

The issue is not whether we uphold expectations for our children, but what those expectations will be, how they will be expressed and implemented, and whose shared responsibility it will be to make sure that they are achieved. For instance, we are not being respectful or caring when we fail to teach children to read, compute, and write; nor are we respectful or caring when we hold differential expectations for children because of their race, gender, or economic status. (p. 666)

In their article “Youth and caring: An introduction,” Robert Chaskin and Diana Mendley Rauner concurred that caring had received too little attention in the education discourse, writing that “to the academic ear, the word itself seems soft, lacking in precision and without boundaries, and therefore not a very useful guide for investigation, let alone for policy making or for directing practice” (p. 670). But, they explained, caring is an important value for researchers to investigate, and it has potential for uniting people across religions and ideologies, even though it runs counter to the individualism that tends to dominate contemporary American society.

“Without caring, individual human beings cannot thrive, communities become violent battlegrounds, the American democratic experiment must ultimately fail, and the planet will not be able to support life.” — Joan Lipsitz, May 1995

How to cultivate care

In their May 1995 article, Chaskin and Mendley asserted that schools are “primary arenas for the nurture and promotion of caring” (p. 273). But can caring be taught explicitly? It can indeed, argued Nel Noddings in the same issue (“Teaching themes of care”). Teachers, she explained, can incorporate lessons about caring into the curriculum by building interdisciplinary units about complex topics — such as war, poverty, or crime — that touch on almost every subject area. Exploring these themes not only requires students to think about how members of society can show care for one another but also helps students feel connected to curricular topics that otherwise would not seem relevant:

Caring is not just a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes people kind and likable. Caring implies a continuous search for competence. When we care, we want to do our very best for the objects of our care. To have as our educational goal the production of caring, competent, loving, and lovable people is not anti-intellectual. Rather, it demonstrates respect for the full range of human talents. Not all human beings are good at or interested in mathematics, science, or British literature. But all humans can be helped to lead lives of deep concern for others, for the natural world and its creatures, and for the preservation of the human-made world. They can be led to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to make positive contributions, regardless of the occupation they may choose. (p. 676)

By and large, however, Kappan authors in the May 1995 issue (and subsequent issues) focused on how teachers demonstrate caring through the relationships they have with students. To better understand what such manifestations of caring look like, George Noblit, Dwight Rogers, and Brian McCadden (“In the meantime: The possibilities of caring”) observed two elementary teachers who were considered highly effective but had very different instructional styles. What they had in common was that they took notice of students who needed extra attention, and their attention paid off:

These teachers’ expressions of care not only enhanced children’s social skills and self-worth but also encouraged their academic development. Genuine caring is expressed by a teacher’s attempt to assist students in reaching their full potential. No one can reach his or her full potential without social skills, a feeling of self-worth, strong academic and cognitive activities, and nurturance and support. (p. 683)

The authors argued that too many teachers focused on “instrumental dimensions of instruction,” such as subject-matter knowledge, planning strategies, and classroom management techniques, which might be helpful, but are not nearly as important as relationship-building:

The children and teachers in our study taught us that the focal point around which teaching should be organized is not the instrumental but the relational. Without this connection, a teacher may have the subject-matter knowledge and the technical ability to teach, but the opportunities for real learning will be scarce, because what the teacher does not have is the student. Caring fosters this teacher/student connection and encourages possibilities for learning that may not otherwise occur. (p. 683)

Relationships at the center

Since the 1990s, Kappan authors have continued to explore how teachers can build positive relationships with students and why those relationships matter. In February 2007, for example, Thomas Mawhinney and Laura Sagan urged teachers to reconsider the idea that they needed to start the school year by being firm:

How often have instructional leaders advised the first-year teacher to be tough in the beginning and loosen up later — that one can never do it in reverse? Well, after that first day of toughness, many students have “downshifted” into a fight-or-flight mode. In doing so they have bypassed much of their capacity for higher order thinking or creative thought, and it is hard to learn when your bodily functions are focused on survival. We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed. (p. 461)

They went on to encourage teachers to take deliberate steps to show students that they care about them through such typical strategies as listening to students, getting involved in student activities, having high expectations, and using humor. They also recommend that teachers look at classroom interactions from a student’s point of view. Sometimes, for example, students assume that teachers will hold a grudge after a student misbehaves, so it’s important that teachers keep relationships intact by consciously reaching out to let students know their mistakes are in the past.

“We can be safe and sterile or take a chance and create a warm, loving community of learners.” — Thomas Mawhinney and Laura Sagan, February 2007

Similarly, in May 2015, Cheryl Ellerbrock and her coauthors (“Relationships: The fundamental R in education”) reminded readers that feeling a sense of care toward students, in and of itself, is not enough:

Personal experiences and beliefs influence our perception of care; in this way, teachers may believe their actions are caring, but students may not interpret them as expressions of care. Caring acts must be recognized as caring for care to truly occur. (p. 48)

Teachers, they argued, need to establish a classroom culture where everyone feels known, respected, and cared for.

However, noted Mawhinney and Sagan in their 2007 article, building strong relationships with students does not come without risk to both students and teachers. It is possible to blur the lines between personal and professional, and it’s important that teachers remain aware of appropriate boundaries. On the whole, though, they believed that the benefits are worth the risk:

We know there is validity in establishing closeness, yet there are land mines all about the countryside. We can be safe and sterile or take a chance and create a warm, loving community of learners. (p. 465)

Getting away from the safe and sterile to create communities of care is not just about making students feel comfortable and happy; it is about creating conditions where they are able to become the intellectually and emotionally competent adults who will shape the future of our nation and our world.


This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 5, pp. 5-7.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teresa Preston

Teresa Preston is editor-in-chief of Phi Delta Kappan and director of publications for PDK International, Arlington, VA.

Visit their website at: https://pdkintl.org/