Download - University of Huddersfield Repository

How do teachers come to care?
Jim Reid
HUDCRES (Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society)
Context
• Institutional ethnography of a primary school during a
period of ‘notice to improve’.
• The problematic, the focus on care arose immediately on
entering the school.
• Joan Tronto’s (1993) argument for a political ethic of
care.
• Use of a narrative method involving 4 readings of the
data – ‘The Listening Guide’ (Mauthner and Doucet
1998) including ‘I’ Poems in data analysis.
Norma’s poem
I spent all weekend preparing and
doing and redoing
If I had just done
What I normally do
I would have been fine
I reached breaking point
I didn’t want to let anybody down.
I put the pressure on myself
I just got into such a stress
I didn’t do myself any favours
I was completely dedicated
I wasn’t actually noticing that things were
going wrong at home
I didn’t even notice
I did notice to some degree but it kind of
wasn’t my priority
I was thinking
I have got too much school work to do
I think suddenly
I thought, “hang on a minute, what’s
important here?”
I think teaching is that kind of job
I was doing
Reading 1 – what’s the story being
told?
• The first part of IE
• Awareness of her history
• Awareness of the material relations at work and at home
(and elsewhere)
• Awareness of herself as care giver
• Awareness as care receiver
Regulatory texts in action:
Privileged irresponsibility to
regulatory responsibility
International
treaties e.g.
UNCRC
Political ideology:
Market
Competition
Accountability, etc.
National
organising
narrative:
Every Child
Matters
National legislation
includes:
 A common law duty
of care
 A statutory duty of
care, and
 A contractual duty
of care.
Regulatory
Responsibility
Dominative Power
Harm, Risk, Need
SEAL
PSHE and
citizenship
Higher order
regulatory
texts
ERA, e.g.:
National curriculum
APP
Politics First Boundary – The power of the political elite is put to work. Ideological narratives are
Piaget
Vygotsky
Froebel
Theoretical texts
Political abstraction: Text-reader
conversations & Talk as text
foregrounded, including through a particular abstraction of social justice to claim plurality in purpose. The
purpose however is to maintain the privilege of the elite.
Ethics
Virtues
Politics
Moral texts
Other
texts
Political boundary
• Manifest in the policies and processes of a
marketised education system and performativity.
• The neo-liberal political agenda provides a powerful
discourse in framing teachers are care givers.
• Teachers as care receivers is also framed in terms of
the contract and policy – outcomes, progress,
employability… - and therefore;
• Activation of the mediating discourse
A moral boundary
Parents and community
Higher order
regulatory texts
Ofsted texts,
e.g. APP
Ofsted inspectors’
reports
Electronic
data
recording
Direction of arrows denotes flow of
communication. Broken arrows
where teachers feel powerless.
Governing body
SIP texts: Novac
Senior Management Team Texts:
Team meetings, observations
and feedback, forms, pupil
progress data, policies…
Observation and
feedback
Team
Meetings
Pupil progress
reports and data
Teachers - A rational morality first boundary.
To be a good teacher is to be a particular care giver:
 Be attentive to reports, data and progress
 To assimilate the power of the elite or risk public humiliation by being
reported as ‘inadequate’ or incompetent
 To accept the particular framing of good teaching and education by
the elite
 Prioritize resources towards meeting standards and regulatory
expectations
 Not to respond to one’s own needs and wider consciousness as care
receivers
Moral boundary
• The need to be good, at least. Better to be
outstanding.
• Policed through a regulatory framework. The dread
of Ofsted!
• Teachers are care givers and care receivers,
however the care received is defined from those
removed from its intimate relations, and therefore;
• From their position of ‘privileged irresponsibility’
(Tronto 1993).
Personal boundaries
• Teachers care. Performing less than ‘good’ frames
teachers as ‘bad’ care givers
• However, this is not ‘bad’ care but a struggle
between a performative demand and their wider
consciousness of care.
• The masculinist ethical narrative permeates
teachers’ emotional labour so that their wider
consciousness of themselves as care receivers is
silenced.
• The embodied care receiver struggles to be heard.
References
• Mauthner, N.S. & Doucet, A. (1998). Reflections on a Voice-Centred
Relational Method of Data Analysis: Analysing Maternal and Domestic
Voices. In Jane Ribbens & Rosalind Edwards (eds.). Feminist Dilemmas in
Qualitative Research: Private Lives and Public Texts. London: Sage.
• Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of
Care. London: Routledge.
Additional reading:
• Tronto, J.C. (2010). Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and
Purpose.•Ethics and Social Welfare, 4 (2), 158-171.
• Tronto, J.C. (2013).Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New
York: New York University Press.