Caring about caring in Kappan

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:

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: