How to Embrace a Pedagogy of Care - An Introduction for Educators
Care is a central concern in any practice that aims to support people’s health and wellness. When we take care of ourselves, we are able to care for others and maintain our own health. When we practice self-care, we are able to take care of others and maintain the health of our practice. In doing so, we are empathetic to their needs and can respond appropriately to them. We know from research and practice that this kind of care has a profound impact on people’s health. The pedagogy of care, therefore, is a way to bring this understanding and responsiveness into our practice. By applying this concept to the design phase, we are providing a space for learners to feel cared for, and therefore increase their sense of belonging and connectedness. As an educator, you can embrace the pedagogy of care in your own teaching by considering the following.
Recognise designing for care is a skill
It's not as easy as it sounds. As educators, you can often think and even say how much you care for your learners and the work you do demonstrates this, however, are you explicitly designing for it or is it implicit in your teaching? Afterall, research shows that cultivating self-care empowers us as people and increases our confidence, so we need to implement strategies into education design to promote self-care.
Care is dependent on empathy
To care for someone means that we understand their situation and respond sensitively to it. Empathy is the capacity to understand and respond to someone else’s situation. It is a capacity that we can cultivate through experience and learning. As an educator, authenticity is important, and when sharing your experiences it is important that some content can 'trigger' some learners, so how do you overcome this? As an educator, you can implement strategies to support the experiences you share, and support learners and their potential responses. From scaffolding content for learners to warnings prior to consuming the content, it is important to be aware of strategies that you can implement. The University of Waterloo highlights some strategies including trigger warnings and how these can be embedded into your practice. Without empathetic understanding, the relationship between the educator and learner can become one with a lack of connection, closeness, and shared experience.
Activities matter
When designing your learner experiences, consider how you can develop a pedagogy of care within your cohort through the activities you are designing. Some things to consider are:
Formative assessment: is the assessment scaffolded for the learner?
Feedback loops: where and when is the feedback? Is it authentic, relevant, and timely?
Content: is the content scaffolded, interesting, and applicable to the learner/s?
Relationships: where are the opportunities for educators to engage with the learners and the learners with their peers?
Support: sometimes support comes in an acknowledgment at the beginning of the content, other times it can be a social learning facilitator or feedback.
Care is action
The ability to respond appropriately to someone else’s situation is an action that we can take. It is a response that we can choose to make and design for these responses accordingly. Caring is a relational action and can only be meaningful when it is enacted. The educator-learner relationship is not static, and it requires ongoing attention and care. We are required to give learners our presence and to invest in their wellbeing. Therefore, in order to sustain such care, it is important to recognise that we can only do so much and respond in ways within our control. To do this, we need to practice self-care, which is an essential part of this as we cannot care for anyone else unless we can first care for ourselves.
Summary
As educators, we have an opportunity to help shape the pedagogy of care. For this reason, we must be committed to designing for care. We must continue to be committed to cultivating empathetic understanding and practice this online. If we, as educators do these things, we will be well-positioned to help shape a future in which care is embraced as a necessary part of online learning.
