10Abbott and Meerabeau (1998).
Caring is not simply caring about—that is, having concern or sentiment for someone or something. It is important to care about students and their success. However, it is another thing to be caring of them. According to Benner and journalist Suzanne Gordon, caring includes but goes beyond feelings of concern and sentiment to actions and interactions—practices—of being in relationship with others and achieving particular aims on their behalves.11 Psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman observes that caring means both worrying and actively doing something about those worries.12
11Benner and Gordon (1996).
12Kleinman (2019).
Caring is not defined by specific actions or interactions. Nor is it defined by a particular set of activities that are necessarily different from those in which one regularly engages. Caring is not necessarily another responsibility that adds to one’s job description and workload. All actions and interactions—all activities—can be viewed through a lens of caring. Again, caring, as we define it, is a quality of a relationship—the matter, manner, and motivation of personal and professional action and interaction.
What Makes Action and Interaction Caring?
From our study, we find three elements that together make actions and interactions caring: (1) the pursuit of particular aims, (2) the activation of positive virtues and mindsets, and (3) competent enactment (see Figure 0.2). These elements form a system of antecedents to caring. Each may have personal and professional dimensions. Moreover, the expression of these elements in caring action and interaction may be affected positively or negatively by a variety of interrelated contexts.
Figure 0.2 What Makes Action and Interaction Caring?
Aims of Caring
Caring is neither aimless nor agnostic in purpose. For actions and interactions to be caring, they must focus on achieving particular purposes. Caring aims to promote the functioning, general well-being, and success of others, as individuals and as groups. Caring addresses particular needs of others and promotes their interests. Caring aims to help others grow and flourish in their own right. Caring is sometimes framed as a response to pain, suffering, and trouble. But it can be proactive and an affirmative expression of joy and celebration. Caring can also be a worthwhile endeavor in itself.
Caring can aim to address particular needs, problems, and concerns. It can aim to achieve tangible benefits, the manner in which and the motivation by which they are provided being as important as the benefits themselves. These benefits can come from what we described earlier as care: particular services and provisions. Caring can aim to promote certain intangible benefits—social, psychological, emotional, and behavioral—that accrue from being in caring relationships and feeling cared for. Finally, caring can aim to promote further caring.
It is not difficult to think about particular aims of education that relate to caring. We consider the general purposes of schooling to provide for students’ safety and nurturance; support their learning, development, independence, self-reliance, prosocial relationships, and ability to function in and contribute to community; promote academic success and general well-being; and prepare students for work, further education, and citizenship.
Positive Virtues and Mindsets
A second element of caring consists of positive virtues and mindsets that are brought to the pursuit of the aims of caring. These virtues include compassion, empathy, patience, sympathy, and kindness. They include fairness and justice, authenticity, humility, and vulnerability. They also include prudence, transparency, honesty, trustworthiness, and respect for others and their integrity.
Four positive mindsets are particularly important to caring. The first is attentiveness to others. If caring is to address others’ needs and interests, one must be attentive to understand, deeply and genuinely, who persons are and what their needs, concerns, interests, and situations might be. Another mindset is motivational orientation. If caring truly means acting on behalf of others, one must be motivated accordingly, and this orientation cannot be diminished by attention to one’s own needs and self-interests. Attentiveness and motivational orientation toward others do not lead to permissiveness nor abdication of responsibility. Rather, they become a positive basis for the fulfillment of responsibility. As theologian Eugene Peterson argues with regard to the helping professions generally, “If we do not keep our assignment, we do not care.”13
13Peterson (1994, p. 71).
A third type of mindset consists of personal and professional identities related to caring. How persons see themselves as caring or uncaring human beings and as capable or incapable of caring will likely affect their efforts to be caring. Likewise, how persons see themselves in a professional role, what they perceive the norms of the profession to require of them, and what they perceive as others’ expectations for them in their role may influence caring. A fourth mindset is playfulness. This mindset reminds us that caring is not a dour enterprise. Although difficult and taxing at times, it can be joyful and fulfilling. Moreover, playfulness is a way of knowing, seeing, and engaging with others that encourages creativity, inventive thinking, and flexibility. Playfulness can reveal the world through others’ eyes—a view that is essential to understanding others, their situations, and ways to be caring of them.
Competencies of Caring
In addition to aims and positive virtues and mindsets, to be caring requires competency. According to Benner and Gordon, professional practice “is always bound up in knowing and doing.”14 Effort and sincerity are important and may be appreciated, but particular actions and interactions may not be perceived as caring or very helpful if they are uninformed, inadequate, misguided, or poorly performed.
14Benner & Gordon (1996, p. 50).
In caring, one important area of competency is knowledge and authentic understanding of others and their needs, problems, joys, concerns, and situations. If educators have inaccurate understanding of who students are and what they want and need, they may make well-meaning attempts to be caring but ultimately miss the mark as to what is caring and helpful in the eyes of students. Developing such understanding is related to one’s ability to inquire, listen and hear, observe and see, assess and understand, and learn about others. Social-emotional intelligence is particularly important to caring and caring school leadership. Also important is understanding persons’ and groups’ races, classes, genders, sexual orientations, languages, cultures, religious beliefs, and relevant contexts. Education scholar Audrey Thompson argues that “the possibility of adequate responsiveness to others depends upon our being able to understand their situations in ways that do not simply reduce them to projections of our … assumptions.”15 She continues that “[school] administrators need to understand the full picture of the worlds in which their students move.”
15Thompson (1998, pp. 541, 543).
A second area of competency concerns understanding the relative effectiveness of strategies to address the needs and concerns of others and to promote their interests. This includes knowledge and skills to engage these strategies successfully. Caring requires knowledge and skill to develop or select, adapt, and enact practices that pursue the aims of caring; that bring virtues of caring to life; and that align with the understanding of others, their situations, and their joys, needs, and concerns. Caring further requires the ability