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Refocusing Educational Practice Through an Ethic of Care

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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse

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Abstract

This chapter begins by examining why the work of educators can be regarded as an ethical social practice at both procedural and substantive levels, based on the virtues of the teaching profession itself and involving a deeply relational approach to ethics, coalescing round the moral concept of care.

Despite the highly ethical nature of the daily work of educators, there is not necessarily an appreciation of how the ethics of the profession can be applied to improve day-to-day professional practice by teachers and school principals.

This chapter offers two ways of remedying this situation: firstly by developing a more comprehensive understanding of the concept of care as it relates to caring for students and colleagues within schools and by outlining a plan for educators to problematize care in their educational practice.

Initial theorizing about education as an ethical social practice has its philosophical foundations in the work of virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 1985), while an examination of the meaning of care as a central moral concept for education is based on a revised understanding of care as developed by Carol Gilligan (1982) and Nel Noddings (1984) in their ethic of care and then revised and expanded by various theorists.

The plan for problematizing care in educational practice outlines an action research framework based in the key dimensions of caring practice, namely, responsiveness, responsibility, and critical reflection, and related personal and interpersonal competencies. It is an approach to ethical professional practice which is dynamic and evolving and which involves educators developing an intersubjectively realized form of moral autonomy and agency in the specific sociocultural context of the school as a collaborative, democratic, and ethical learning community.

Val Catchpoole was retired

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  1. Balmoral, Brisbane, Australia

    Val Catchpoole

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Catchpoole, V. (2021). Refocusing Educational Practice Through an Ethic of Care. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_88-2

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Refocusing Educational Practice Through an Ethic of Care
    Published:
    26 March 2022

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_88-2

  2. Original

    Refocusing Educational Practice Through an Ethic of Care
    Published:
    22 January 2021

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_88-1

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