Finding Joy: Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education 9004547509, 9789004547506, 9789004547513, 9789004547520

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Finding Joy

Finding Joy

CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE FUTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education Natalie Davey

Finding Joy offfers readers the opportunity to spend time with educational philosophers like Gert Biesta, Nel Noddings, Michael Fielding and Maxine Greene. A relational reading of education-adjacent thinkers like D.W. Winnicott and Martha Nussbaum also point to the work that must be done to sustain and grow a thriving collegium in a changing world. Using narrative interviews and a/r/tographical research to help unpack what care looks like in education across various sectors, this book suggests that collegiality and care are required for the support of both teachers and students.

Natalie Davey

Natalie Davey

Cover illustration: Band Instruments, by Joy Elizabeth Kim

Finding Joy Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education

How can we manifest more relational care in education by harnessing joy in the school setting? Finding Joy suggests it is found in care-based pedagogies, radical collegiality and relational reading practices. Guided by philosophical conversations with educational thinkers whose works have informed the author’s own praxis over a twenty-year career in public education, at the end of each chapter the reader is given provocations for reflection through a series of questions.

Natalie Davey, Ph.D. (2016), Yorkville University, teaches in the Faculty of Education at that university. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in North America and internationally.

CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE FUTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

ISBN 978-90-04-54750-6

ISSN 2542-8721 CIFL 25

Spine

Finding Joy

Critical Issues in the Future of Learning and Teaching Series Editors Britt-Marie Apelgren (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) Pamela Burnard (University of Cambridge, UK) Nese Cabaroglu (University of Cukurova, Turkey) Pamela M. Denicolo (University of Reading, UK)

Founding Editors Pamela M. Denicolo (University of Reading, UK) Michael Kompf† (Brock University, Canada)

Volume 25

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cifl

Finding Joy Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education By

Natalie Davey

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Band Instruments, by Joy Elizabeth Kim All chapters in this book have undergone peer review. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2542-8721 isbn 978-90-04-54750-6 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-54751-3 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-54752-0 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Natalie Davey. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and Relational Pedagogies in the K-12 Classroom 4 1 Relational Pedagogy: An Introduction 6 2 Relational Pedagogy in Action 7 3 Social-Emotional Learning and Relational Pedagogies 9 4 Reflection Questions for Educators 12

2

Finding Joy through Care: Nel Noddings’ Caring Relation 13 1 A Wider Web of Care 18 2 Reflection Questions for Educators 21

3

A Pedagogy of Care 23 1 The Good Enough Teacher 23 2 Building the Framework: Hochschild, Noddings and Winnicott 25 3 Key Tenets: A Pedagogical Model of Care 34 4 Barriers 38 5 An Anticipated Future of Educational Care 38 6 Reflection Questions for Educators 39

4

Radical Collegiality and Cross-Institutional Partnerships 40 1 Research Methodology 41 2 Fielding’s “Radical Collegiality” 42 3 Student Surveys and Narrative Analysis of Participant Interviews 45 4 Extending beyond This Study 51 5 Reflection Questions for Educators 52

5

Finding Joy through a Relational Reading Practice 54 1 Relational Learning through Relational Reading 56 2 Relational Reading with Gert Biesta 57 3 Biesta’s Relational Reading of Levinas 60 4 Relational Reading with Maxine Greene 61

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5 6 7 6

Narrative Compassion: Putting Biesta and Greene into Action 66 Compassion, Joy and Relational Care 69 Reflection Questions for Educators 70

Finding Joy: How to Be Good Enough beyond the Classroom 71 1 Pedagogies of Care and Radical Collegiality in the Virtual Classroom 72 2 Pedagogies of Care and Radical Collegiality beyond the Classroom 75 References 79 Index 84

Preface The recent institutional push for Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and mental health care to be taken up in the realm of education strikes an inauthentic note to those navigating the structural limitations of day-to-day life in K-12 schools. The limits of authentic institutional care are evidenced by rising numbers of teachers leaving the profession across the international education community, and the impacts of those losses are felt by the most undervalued and underserved who suffer deeply from the fallout. This book presents the possibility for interruptive joy to break through for teachers in spite of institutional limitations. That joy can be found in care-based pedagogies, radical collegiality and what the author calls a “relational reading practice” as seen in philosophical conversations with teacher-supportive educational thinkers whose works have informed the author’s own praxis over a twenty-year career in public education. At the end of each chapter the reader is given thematic provocations in the form of a series of questions for reflection to help answer: How can we manifest more relational care in education by harnessing joy in the school setting?

Introduction I am named after my cousin Joy. Her death, like her name, is a part of me. Both have informed who I am as a teacher and a learner, these days more than ever. We were not especially close for she and her family lived in Seattle while we lived in Toronto. We would only see each other when our families came together for big events like our grandfather’s milestone birthday or a cousin’s wedding. Following one of those celebrations, as a child I remember my mother, sister and I driving with Joy and my aunt. It was late and the adults were keen to get us off to bed. In the rush someone closed the car door too quickly, catching Joy’s leg in the slam. Her screams pierced the night and they would not stop. As my aunt held Joy tightly, trying to calm her into silence, my mother moved my sister and me into the safety of the house. She was both afraid for my aunt and afraid of Joy. We sat together in a huddle as my mother prayed. Bipolarism and prayer determined Joy’s journey to the very end. For years we lived parallel lives of a sort. We were both teachers and aspiring artists, Joy painting while I wrote. We loved our students and our families deeply. That love was why it pained Joy every time she had to leave them. Navigating a bipolar disorder in the precarious landscape of American teaching jobs was a never-ending battle. Any time Joy attempted to live her life free of medication, with all of its challenging side effects, her world would inevitably spiral. The disruption to her teaching career and her personal life was constant and unforgiving. Even with her mother’s support, and a faith that kept her buoyed, Joy’s reality was inherently lonely. Moving from city to city, forced to start again with a new school board, required of my cousin a strength that took its toll. I have moved schools a number of times in my twenty-year career so I can empathise with aspects of her experience, but for Joy the jitters of starting at a new school were all the more intensified by needing to find a new apartment, learning a new city, and endeavouring to create some sort of community for support. One of the loneliest parts of each “fresh start” would have been the reality of entering a new school staffroom. How much could she share with her colleagues and administrators? Her students? Who could she trust? After countless moves and disruptions, hospitalisations and abandonments, Joy called her mother to say goodbye. My aunt knew something was wrong, but unlike that night in the dark driveway, Joy was too far away to reach out and hold. Lonely and fatigued from the ongoingness of her fight to simply exist, to be seen, my cousin died by suicide at the age of 46. I started my teaching career with the largest school board in Canada not too long after Joy’s career start. It took me half a year to secure a permanent © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_001

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position and over the years I had the opportunity to move with relative ease between mainstream schools and alternative programs, from higher education and then back to public education. My journey has not been without its bumps, but I was always protected by a strong union and, for the most part, each move I made was my choice. Unlike Joy’s experience, my movements within the school board benefited me and my career in the long run. Joy’s forced moves across state lines to different schools were necessary to her remaining in the profession she loved. She desperately wanted to teach but the impacts of her bipolarism were systemically held against her, impacting her chances to be close to her support systems. Though my cousin was deeply loved and cared for by close family and friends, over the years the limits of system and schoolbased care for educators wore her down. I am editing this introduction on my phone as I wait in line for my third vaccine dose as Covid-19 continues to destroy lives two years after it made its appearance in our world. For the past two years there has been an institutional push in the realm of education for mental health care to work its way into all iterations of the classroom. Though I applaud this push to take care seriously for the student, for the teacher, and for the various forms of community that exist within the realm of education, the intangible nature of putting words into action is laid bare when the day-to-day of educational life in this pandemic is, at best, survived. I know many teachers who have survived the last two years, but as a group we are not thriving. The limits of authentic care are strikingly apparent. Though the pandemic has seen higher numbers of teachers leaving the profession across the U.S. and Canada, problems with teacher retention did not begin in 2020. The limits of care shown to teachers directly impacts students and their families, and it is the most undervalued and underserved who suffer the deepest from the fallout. This book speaks to the need for a valuing of and investment in educational care—both by the powers who create educational systems and policies, and at the ground level where administrators, teachers and students co-create learning spaces. Chapter 1 starts with a broad view of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) skills as they have been taken up in educational systems locally and globally. Then the chapter hones in on specific Relational Pedagogies that evidence suggests are effective in the K-12 Classroom. Chapter 2 connects Nel Noddings’ “caring relation” (2003) to my interpretation of relational teaching to build a case for a pedagogy of care framework presented in Chapter 3. In Chapter 3 I detail a pedagogy of care for alternative educators specifically, yet applicable to all teacher-learners. I work with D.W. Winnicott’s notion of “the good enough mother” and bring it into the educational realm.

Introduction

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Chapter 4 looks at the term “radical collegiality.” Based on a research project entitled “An Exercise in Partnership,” this chapter presents a case study that highlights the importance of radical collegiality, focusing on the grey zone of support that secondary school teachers in one college pathway program are tasked to provide for both their partnering college instructors and their shared students. The study uses student surveys and interviews with SWAC/ Dual Credit educators in one Toronto college to gauge experiences of crossinstitutional partnership. The study asks participants if they have experienced benefits from the program’s partner-based classroom structure and if they have experienced something akin to Michael Fielding’s (1999) “radical collegiality” in the SWAC/Dual Credit classroom. Chapter 5 is an exploration of my own relational reading practice, specifically focused on my engagement with both Gert Biesta and Maxine Greene, and how they have informed a reading of other educationally sustaining and care-filled texts. Both thinkers model a balance between focusing on care for both student and fellow teacher, inviting us to consider how joy can be used to sustain that care over time. Finally, Chapter 6 offers a critical look at what joy might look like from an educational vantage point alongside some afterthoughts on what it means to be educationally good enough. Both relational pedagogies and radical collegiality are considered as they are lived out beyond the limitations of a traditional classroom. This chapter speaks to education writ large, offering insights to those who work in teaching and learning capacities outside of brick-andmortar schools, shining a spotlight on the complexities of virtual education. A creative way to interrogate and interrupt the lack of care that is driving educators from the field is to place value on and invest in joy. In this book I hope that we might consider what it means to care in the classroom. What might care and joy look and feel like even as we live both out in educational systems that are big and impersonal? How can we manifest more care in the classroom? Can joy be found in that care?

CHAPTER 1

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and Relational Pedagogies in the K-12 Classroom My doctoral thesis was memory-based, and though I didn’t know it at the time, relational pedagogies of care underpinned what I was doing with my research. It began with an attempt to return to where my teaching career began: the central booking facility for detained youth in Ontario, Canada where I was a literacy teacher for 13- to 17-year-olds awaiting trial. Over time the project morphed into a work of educational philosophy and arts-based research practices, but the one constant that remained true throughout the whole process was the ongoingness of my own learning. For many years the detention centre was located in downtown Toronto, but the provincial government made the decision to shutter the smaller site and replace it with a “superjail” facility that was opened in a suburb west of the city. My doctoral project aimed to problematise the move to the larger, more impersonal detention facility. I hoped that through memories shared between a group of people who had passed time together at the original centre we might be able to [re]member a dead place. I wanted to know if there was any educational life left in it to bring forward into the present. Was there more learning for us to do with our memories and could that learning help others in the field of education? I began by searching out people to remember with. I was able to contact former detention staff members and through them was able to contact former youth residents who had been detained at the time we were working there. Before any conversations with the participants I created a vocabulary to guide our conversations and help to ground our remembering. Key terms that emerged were become, educational, and missed. What did it mean to educationally become in a forlorn place like a youth detention centre? Was there any educational potential embedded in the time students spent with teachers and detention staff? Were learning opportunities missed in both past and present tense within that foreclosed space? The vocabulary set was italicised to emphasise a temporal sense of both past and present. As the language developed for the project so did the questions I asked of it. I did not want to stop at educational considerations for the students. I wanted to know if some educational potential had been lived out for the caregivers as well. Were staff and teachers educationally becoming in that place as much, or © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_002

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even more, than the students? I recognised how I had been affected by my time at the detention centre, so it seemed possible that others might have experienced something similar. As I read pedagogues and educational philosophers like Gert Biesta and Zygmunt Bauman, my project’s notion of becoming in an educational sense became tied to a growing sense of personal identity and self. According to Biesta (2012) a student’s sense of self or subjectivity occurs as they make meaning of both places of learning and the sporadic influence of their teachers. One of my mentors, Mario Di Paolantonio, emphasises the importance of a community of learners to facilitate a space in which educational becoming can occur. He sees students who “pass time” together to be working through critical questions of thought and positions this passing of time in opposition to school-based learning that is often limited to skills-based instruction. His words applied to the detention centre classroom and so the project came to focus on the missed opportunities to become that happened in the unlikely educational place of the shuttered detention centre. With that project I had big dreams of highlighting gaps that existed in the limited research done with detained youth in educational scholarship, and in some ways I achieved what I set out to do. Though my italicised terms did not become the kind of “public vocabulary” that Angela Davis (2013) writes of, my work was the beginning of something. The importance of the project lay in what Claudia Eppert (2011) describes as “witness-learning” that happened for a small group of us. For me and for others in my circle of care a vigilant and careful process of “interrogating those moments of memory that threaten to appropriate or deny the radical difference of another’s experience” occurred (p. 749). And because the work did not stop at interviews, but also included collaged and framed fragments salvaged from the detention classroom, the rendering of the detention centre’s educational past as art was taken forward and used to disrupt future meaning-making of school life in detention. Every time I brought the shadow box that contained the collage of detention fragments into a new classroom with me, in small ways that a/r/tographical component of the larger project was added to an even larger discourse community. But research dissemination is already a long and bumpy road for even the most seasoned academic and I was a public school teacher. Working as an independent researcher created a negative space where educational isolation set in. The isolation I experienced is lived out by educators at all levels of teaching and learning. Whether they are engaged in formal institutional research or living out action research on the ground in schools and professional learning communities, educators have a lot of noise to cut through in the ongoing effort to have their voices heard. Good work of great care is happening every day,

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from arts-based projects to inter-school community endeavours, but to sustain that work is no easy task. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic public opinion of teachers and education was laid bare. K-12 teachers watched as some of their most vocal supporters shifted from celebration of to anger with educators because of their call for safe working conditions in schools. The debate over online versus in-person schooling butted up against the economic realities of a world determined to get back to “normal” no matter the cost. According to the 2021 report by the Global Status of Teachers and the Teaching Profession, the ongoing mental health and wellbeing of teachers “is of concern.” Such a report shines a glaring spotlight on the isolation that is lived out by too many teachers, prompting the question: what is missing across the educational spectrum? What do teachers need throughout and beyond this challenging time in education? I believe that the core of what is missing in education is care, and building on Eppert’s words, a vigilant and care-filled process of interrogating this present educational moment seems a good place to start in our search for mitigating answers.

1

Relational Pedagogy: An Introduction

I posit that to be most effective as care-givers, teachers need to experience both joy and care themselves. Narrative data read alongside low teacher retention rates that span the globe point to the care that has been missing from systems of education worldwide, glaringly so throughout Covid (Wyatt & O’Neill, 2021). Yet, research show that this lack of care is not a new problem. One University of British Columbia study, “School Climate and Social Emotional Learning: Predicting Teacher Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Teaching Efficacy” (Collie, Shapka, & Perry, 2012), highlights the existence of this lack of care and what happens to students because of it. The study ends up making a link that ties the relationship between learner and teacher to the health and well-being of both parties. Looking at three outcomes, specifically teacher stress, teaching efficacy and job satisfaction, researchers ask how school climate and the integration of educational innovations impact the outcomes for teachers. Social innovation in this study refers to the directive given to teachers to embed Social Emotional Learning strategies into their curriculum. Researchers found that “teachers’ perceptions of school climate and SEL … [were] inextricably related to students’ and schools’ outcomes” (p. 1200). Thus, despite its value, the innovative SEL-based material was not the study component that had the greatest impact on students or teachers. Instead, the impact was deeply connected to teachers’ perceptions of the school, and the way they were communicated with and

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recognised by those in power. The buy-in to the work with SEL strategies came through teachers feeling recognised as having valuable input to offer. Said another way, when teachers feel seen and listened to by administrators and the educational systems within which they work, everyone benefits, especially students. Even as social-emotional learning strategies are valuable for both students and their teachers, taking in the bigger educational picture obligates a cleareyed recognition of what sustains inherently relational work. Valuing SEL and other relationally pedagogical tools necessitates, at its core, a valuing of pedagogical care. Relational pedagogy is a theoretical perspective based on the concept of people as relational beings and teaching as a relational process. Its philosophical roots are derived from a “philosophical tradition and classical relational philosophers, such as Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, with contemporary interpreters like Gert Biesta” (Ljungblad, 2018). Each of these thinkers has informed my praxis over the years. There is also the seminal work of Charles Bingham and Alexander M. Sidorkin (2004), No Education without Relation. In it they bring together voices, including Nel Noddings who writes the forward, to describe this pedagogy based on what they see to be “a practical need for relational educational theory that strives for democratic relations” (Ljungblad, 2018).

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Relational Pedagogy in Action

As important as it is to theorise relational pedagogy in writing, it is something altogether different to put democratic relations into action in the classroom. An eighteen-year-old in a senior level English literature class came up to me after the bell rang. I was hungry and conscious of the time, looking ahead to an already shortened lunch period, but as I was closing my laptop something in the way she sat down next to me prompted me to pause. A story spilled out about issues she was having with another teacher in the school, someone I did not know personally but was still technically a colleague. The young Somali-Canadian student pointed to her hijab and spoke passionately about feeling erased in the other teacher’s class and gave examples of how those feelings had come about. She shared of taking her complaints of Islamophobic comments made by the teacher to both the school principal and superintendent, but cried when she recalled how others in the same class who had said they would support her call to action disappeared enroute to the administrator’s office. She filed the complaint alone, facing a room full of wary adults holding official looking pads of paper. Wiping her tears away, the student said,

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“You’re the first white teacher I can speak honestly to.” I felt the weight of those words. The conversation was multipronged, because striving for democratic relations with this student did not negate what I also had to navigate in terms of what it meant to be a colleague in a unionised environment. In a union there are necessary systems and processes in place to ensure that democratic and ethical interactions between colleagues are protected. Thus, my relational responsibilities to the student and to the colleague were not without their complexities. By sitting and simply listening, giving the student the space to feel heard and seen as she named whiteness and power as barriers to communication, we unearthed something relational from a situation that felt anything but for her. We talked about racism, activism, and how the application of self-care is not always obvious in the face of complex power dynamics. When our conversation came to a close we both recognised that the “next steps” we needed to take were not necessarily going to send us out in the same direction. It was not a perfect moment as it in no way redeemed the ongoing systemic issues of racism and xenophobia that continue to mar educational and social institutions worldwide. But the moment did mean something at the level of relational pedagogy in action. In terms of pedagogical relations, Ljungblad (2018) also points to the work of social scientist Kenneth J. Gergen who has probed “into how individual reason is an outcome of relationships.” The individual reason applied to our “next steps” was an outcome of our relationship. As individuals we walked away from our lunchtime conversation recognising what needed to be done for the greater good, not just for our relationship to each other and to ourselves, but also to the larger school community. If, as Tone Saevi (2011) writes, “The pedagogical act of seeing someone … is a relational precondition for pedagogical practice,” then teachers who want a long and healthy career need to get comfortable with first and foremost taking a good hard look at themselves. Naming my privilege as a white woman in a position of power as a teacher and as one whose faith has not been used by far right white supremacist voices as a tool to prop up hateful and divisive rhetoric, helped to carve out a relationally pedagogical space for my student and me. It is through the act of seeing people where the story of educational care must begin, including the educator’s seeing and caring for herself. With Herman Nohl’s (1933) theory of the “pedagogical relation” Norm Friesen (2019) writes that for Nohl, “Pedagogy … is above all about love—love for who the child is and what he or she will become” (p. 1). Though an excellent starting point, focusing solely on love for the child is not inherently relational since a give and take is missing from the equation. We must go a step further. Where love and care intersect is in the student/teacher binary, where the one

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recognises their need for the other to exist (Davey, 2018). It is through relational discourse and the care that underpins it that I posit joy is made possible for educators and students alike. The praxis of pedagogical care requires of the teacher-learner a love of herself and of learning within community. That community begins with colleagues and students, but extends to and beyond the community writ large. From that stance relational learning becomes located in both person and educational place.

3

Social-Emotional Learning and Relational Pedagogies

The 2012 UBC study concerning school climate and teacher stress gestures to how relationality and social-emotional learning strategies (SEL) are interconnected. To understand more of that interconnection requires that we situate ourselves in the educational landscape of SEL. A wide lens look at SEL strategies enables a deeper dive into how relational pedagogy and educational care are intertwined. From a Canadian perspective a foray into SEL and education begins with the Pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health (JCSH). JCSH is a partnership of 25 Ministries of Health and Education across Canada working to promote what they call a “Comprehensive School Health approach to student wellness/well-being and achievement/success for all children and youth” (JCSH, 2022). Social-emotional wellness is the heart of SEL as defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL): SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.1 CASEL ’s definition makes a point to include both students and adult teacherlearners in the pursuit of social-emotional development. The focus is on both sides of the relational equation, “the student/teacher binary” (Davey, 2018a). In the midst of Covid-19 upheavals in education CASEL went further and put words into action by developing SEL resources for teachers, many of whom were struggling through one of the lowest points in their professional lives (Cipriano & Brackett, 2020). CASEL partnered with Yale’s Centre for Emotional Intelligence to design SEL supports for teachers, emphasising that though, “positive emotions like joy and curiosity harness attention and promote greater engagement … the challenge is that most teachers have not received a formal

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education in emotion skills” (Emotions Matter section, para. 15). Thus, relational pedagogies that explicitly guide educators to see themselves and care for their own well-being, even as they care for students, are shown to be necessary tools that need to be discussed and shared in educational circles. Mirroring some of the original SEL aims and philosophical underpinnings, almost a decade later relational pedagogies were introduced by Bingham and Sidorkin (2004) in The Pedagogy of Relation. Those pedagogies are “based on the assumption that relations have primacy over the isolated self” and they focus on “how interhuman relations affect and define teaching and learning” (p. 2). In their “Manifesto of Relational Pedagogy” the authors emphasise how learning curriculum and relational learning are a package deal. The inseparable nature of what they define as “meeting and learning” points towards an inherently social component built into the educational environment. As educators they write, “We must learn to meet … [b]ecause we must meet to learn” (p. 5). Three key tenets from their manifesto that I will return to throughout the book state: 1. Teaching is building educational relations. Aims of teaching and outcomes of learning can both be defined as specific forms of relations to oneself, people around the students, and the larger world. 2. Educational relation is different from any other; its nature is transitional. Educational relation exists to include the student in a wider web of relations beyond the limits of the educational relation. 3. Relations are not necessarily good; human relationality is not an ethical value. Domination is as relational as love (p. 7). With their manifesto Bingham and Sidorkin shift the spotlight from individuals onto relations in all of their complexities. The emphasis placed on relationality and learning to meet is important as I make the connection to teacher care. Like the SEL competencies that are important for both students and teachers to learn and adopt, a relational process of learning to meet is not limited to students. Just as young people are growing and developing, so must educators continue to do so to sustain a career in teaching. I use the terms brought forward in my doctoral project by way of example. While researching the detention centre’s long term educational life, words like becoming, the educational and that which had the potential to be missed were all cross-applied to detention centre residents and their various adult caregivers. Like learning to meet, the inherent relationality of the project’s vocabulary needed to be recognised and valued by educational caregivers if they were to receive something from the new educational story of the detention centre. The learning did not reside outside of us as educators.

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The place-making happened inside of us! The restorying of the detention centre points to a larger truth: If relational pedagogies are not learned and valued, educational care for and by teachers risks being missed. Sadly, we all have colleagues and administrators who have both missed out on and been missed in the relational work that is school life. In one of my last years as a high school English teacher I was asked by a department head to mentor a new teacher who I would be co-teaching a course with. This colleague had been in the field for five years, moved around from school to school, navigating a teaching climate that normalised not getting a permanent position within a school board in Ontario for upwards of a decade. Some teachers I’ve mentored who have moved from school to school in those first five to ten years have soaked up learning experiences on their travels. They have grown on the journey, developing their identities as teachers with flexibility and responsiveness. But others, like this colleague, travelled a different path, a road defined by inflexibility instead of introspection. No matter what way I tried to frame student-centred and culturally responsive pedagogies in our course planning together, this young teacher’s response to my suggestions was firmly rooted in “No.” My relational efforts never made it through the staffroom door. Though he was friendly enough, my colleague saw us as educators on two sides of a big divide. He was fifteen years my junior but prided himself on being stuck in his ways saying, “I’m old school, Natalie! I teach the way I was taught”! I was awestruck! At five years into teaching I was just starting to understand what my own developing pedagogy was becoming, and yet here was this young man firmly entrenched in an anti-relational stance, and he was clinging to it for dear life. He did not see his students, let alone his colleagues, as allies in his pedagogical journey. Unless a colleague saw teaching through his very narrow lens, this young teacher refused to find relational community in potential mentors like myself or administration who I know tried to support him. I found it so sad that an uncaring system had in many ways set him on this anti-relational path. His sporadic movements around the school board had negated a real possibility of developing a collegial community where trust could be fostered. A truth emerges from his unfortunate example for us to learn from. To look inward and reflect requires time and space, and neither felt available to him as his energy was being depleted chasing after long term occasional teaching positions that only ever lasted three to six months. Though well-intentioned, my mentoring care was not enough to interrupt such a selfenclosed mindset. Thus, it would seem that for educational care and joy to break into a teacher’s story, the narrative must begin before meeting in the classroom.

12 4 1. 2. 3. 4.

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Reflection Questions for Educators How do interhuman relations affect and define teaching and learning in your own practice as an educator? Where did relational care break into your educational story? Was it through connection with students or colleagues or another relation altogether? What form of relational care is missing from your educational story? What potential for change or growth exists within your control in terms of putting relational pedagogies into practice in your educational setting?

Note 1 https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/

CHAPTER 2

Finding Joy through Care Nel Noddings’ Caring Relation

Norm Friesen (2017) writes of the teacher’s interior life in relation to pedagogy: Fractures and discontinuities in our own adult subjectivity bring a heterogeneity and difference all their own. In its instabilities, passions and pains, unsettled adult subjectivity becomes relevant in and because of an ‘intensely experienced’ relation with the educand. (p. 14) Countless teachers I have had the privilege of working alongside over the last two decades feel intensely for the students they work with. They have taken to heart a student-centred pedagogy, recognising that the stories their students bring to class shape the educational space. But in keeping relational pedagogies of care front of mind, it is equally important for teachers to acknowledge that they also bring stories into the shared space of the classroom. I relate to Friesen’s description of those “fractures and discontinuities” in the teacher’s adult subjectivity because honouring the impact of one’s personal stories as a teacher and how those stories impact life in the classroom can seem counterintuitive for some educators. But just as life does not simply stop and start upon entry and exit of the classroom for our students, neither does it for teachers. It has taken me a long time to find balance in terms of honouring my own stories in the classroom. I remember sitting in a conference room with a principal, taking a moment to be vulnerable and honest with her about the hard time I was having after my divorce was finalised. I was twenty-seven years old and only a year into my job at a new school. She was a seasoned principal close to retirement. The conversation was a relational disaster for I imposed something on her that she was not willing or able to give. Looking back, I can see how naive I was to assume she would care for me like my mother did. I learned of my imposition the hard way when I began to cry for a moment and the air in the room shifted. From across the table she looked at me and said coolly, “Is your ability to do your job being affected?” I can still viscerally remember how immediately my tears dried up as I responded, mirroring her tone with an equally cool “No.” “Good” she said standing up, dismissing me, “Now take care of yourself.” It was a surreal experience. How was I to take care of myself in that space when so little care was shown to me? There was no modelling © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_003

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of vulnerability or care shown in that relational moment and so I shut down. Fifteen years later, I know that I learned a valuable lesson in that conference room. I cannot count how many students have cried with me since that day. Remembering what it was like to be so completely shut down, I have always worked to be a different kind of relational actor, listening and learning with each tear shed. How else to salvage something from the wreckage but to go forward with care for others? Meeting and learning relationally is impossible without personal reflection, and teaching relationally is impossible without care. But to make that care truly sustainable requires joy. It is not enough to feel care for care for colleagues, students and oneself. In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan (1982) writes that “the ideal of care is … an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone” (p. 42). Said another way, care must be enacted for joy to break in. In spite of relational disasters like what happened with my former principal, throughout my career there has been a web of connection that has sustained me as a teacher. By extension, threads from that web of care have wound their way through and beyond me to support others. Administrators have opened doors and instead of walking through alone, I have worked to take other teachers through the door with me. This practice is valued by educational philosopher Nel Noddings (1986) whose work on ethical caring and the obligation associated with “the caring relation” has been helpful in building the framework for what I call relational teaching. Noddings’ feminist theorising of care has been taken up in various fields, from education to medicine. Her work has also been importantly critiqued by feminist scholars (Hoagland, 1990) and diversified to fill in theoretical gaps around race (Chun, 2007). Those critiques have informed my work with Noddings’ ethics of care, helping me to frame and reframe an imperfect theory within equally imperfect educational systems. Thus, I have chosen to construct a pedagogical framework of care using the building blocks provided by Noddings using both a critical eye and a teacher’s open heart. The role of the teacher is multifaceted. In our best moments we are to listen, teach, dialogue, and play, driven by the pedagogical goal of “whole child development.” Beyond content delivery distilled down, a teacher’s job is to care. Noddings is very specific in her distinction between what she means by caring and the act of caregiving, and she uses teaching as a profession defined by caregiving to exemplify why the two terms cannot be equated or conflated. She describes the first as a “rapidly developing normative moral theory” that is concerned with how we should meet and treat one another. For Noddings, the heart of that theory looks at how to establish, maintain and enhance caring

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relations between people. Noddings recognises caregiving as an important element in care ethics but points out that as a set of activities or an occupation, it can be done with or without caring. Of teaching, for example, Noddings writes, A primary message of caring is that we cannot justify ourselves as carers by claiming “we care.” If the recipients of our care [for example, students] insist that “nobody cares,” caring relations do not exist. (p. xvi) In care ethics Noddings believes that, [W]e are interested in maintaining and enhancing caring relations— attending to those we encounter, listening to their expressed needs, and responding positively if possible. But even when we must deny the need expressed, we try to do so in a way that will preserve the caring relation. (p. xvi) Because there are so many different personalities in any given classroom filled with students with outside lives that they cannot leave at the door when they enter, a teacher will encounter students who express needs she cannot meet. In those moments when we “must deny the need expressed,” the teacher’s job is to do so with care so that future needs may be expressed, needs that may be possible for a teacher to meet. The teacher’s job is to keep the door of the caring relation propped open for that potentiality. Noddings opposes analytic philosophy’s focus on principles and rules as the “major guide to ethical behaviour” (p. 4). Care theorists, according to Noddings, put limited faith in principles. For example, the Kantian “categorical imperative” is all well and good in theory, but even as principles keep “daily life running smoothly … when a real conflict arises … we have to dig behind the principle to see what deeper value has engendered it” (p. 4). My educator’s spirit connects with Noddings on this point as I see a link between digging behind the principle and my own teaching of metacognitive thinking to students and teacher candidates where I ask them to consider why they do what they do. Noddings rejects the notion of universalizability or the notion of one overarching “golden rule,” for she feels that “our efforts must be directed to the maintenance of conditions that will permit caring to flourish” (p. 4). Perhaps those conditions were missing from my young colleague’s educational story, negating his ability (or desire) to be metacognitive in his own teacherly practice. In metacognitive terms, the maintenance of conditions that permit care means asking why and then asking why again, digging below the surface so as to unearth what needs to flourish: care for the other.

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To unpack the caring relation we need to start by fleshing out those parts that make the concept whole. First, Noddings defines the two parties of the caring relation as the one-caring and the cared-for. Their relationship is rooted in receptivity, relatedness and responsiveness. These relational qualities work to keep both parties on the path towards an ethical ideal. She explains, A caring relation is ethically basic … [in that] caring is a relationship that contains another, the cared-for, and … the one-caring and cared-for are reciprocally dependent … The world is not divided into carers and caredfors as separate and permanent classes. We are all inevitably cared-fors at many times and, ideally, most of us are carers. (p. xxi) What Noddings means by the caring relation, then, starts from her premise that relations, not individuals, require that “we recognize human encounter and affective response as a basic fact of human existence” (p. 4). For example, when a parent holds his infant close in a posture of care, the child communicates the receipt of that care by turning into the embrace. The infant has no language with which to name an acceptance of her father’s care but physically she responds. Her affective turn into her father’s embrace is evidence of a completed caring relation where the carer and cared-for work together. According to Noddings the caring relation is not always innate. The in-built reciprocal dependence of the infant/parent caring relation does not necessarily extend to the other relationships of caregiving like that between a teacher and her student and I would add a colleague between a colleague. Noddings would say that in the case of a teacher for a student what is required to establish a caring relation is the “ethical ideal of care.” The ethical ideal of caring is comprised of memories, specifically of how we have “responded over time in our best encounters as carers and how others have cared for us” (p. 79). Acts of analysis, evaluation and reflection underpin the ethical ideal, what is essentially the image of the kind of person one wants to be. That ideal plays out tangibly in the context of education. Noddings (2003) writes, The caring attitude … is universally accessible but with the awareness that since we are dependent upon the strength and sensitivity of the ethical ideal—both our own and that of others—we must nurture that ideal in all of our educational encounters … The primary aim of all education must be nurturance of the ethical ideal. (p. 6) This primary aim to nurture the ethical ideal in all students was the pedagogical basis for my work with youth in detention and is integral to my pedagogical stance as a relational educator. Without analysis, evaluation and reflection

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of the kind of person a student sees herself to be, how can that student ever become the kind of person she wants to be? The same questions should also be asked of the teacher. The educational curriculum of intrinsic skill building in terms of personal analysis and reflection must, therefore, be taught and nurtured for both student and teacher to thrive. For Noddings there is an important distinction to be made between caring about and caring for. The former expresses concern but without the guarantee of a response to one who needs care. The latter is characterised by direct attention and response, requiring the “establishment of a caring relation [and] person-to-person contact of some sort” (p. xiv). Such a distinction is important when considering the “function of institutions and large organizations in supporting caring” (p. xiv). According to Noddings a school cannot necessarily care for everyone directly. What she would suggest is that the institution can work toward “establishing an environment in which caring-for can flourish” (p. xv). I would suggest that for such an environment to be established, the goal of caring-for must be understood as an educational one. Such an institutional goal may have been an effective starting point, a place of interruptive care for the young colleague I had trouble mentoring. The care couldn’t start with me as there was no relational bridge to cross over. But his memories of past care in school would have been something the department head or school administration could have hooked into in his hiring to set a more caring tone from the start. To flourish within an institutional environment Noddings says, the “distinctive contribution” of the cared-for to the relation is as important as what is brought in by the one-caring (p. 6). I have already used the example of contributions made by the infant to the parent-child relation, such as a smile in response to a gentle touch. In the classroom there is the contribution of the student to the teacher-student relation. In that setting the cared-for’s response might be as simple as a thank you to a teacher who took time to answer the student’s question. In the detention centre students contributed to the caringrelation when they returned their pencils at the end of class. I only had eight pencils to work with since they all had to be accounted for by the detention staff, so a returned pencil signalled a contribution of care on the part of the cared-fors. Returning the pencil was the resident’s way of acknowledging my role as teacher. With that act he or she was claiming a role as a student-participant in my classroom. Upon leaving the pencil behind they entered a new set of potentially caring relations with staff. With them other items of significance would emerge. In my memories of the detention centre and so many other classrooms I have spent time in, I can recall encounter after encounter where the students I cared-for did a reciprocal job of caring for me. Noddings’ focus on the interdependent nature of human relationships and care is also reflected in the

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interchanging nature of carer and cared-for inside those various classrooms. For example, I can remember a fight breaking out in the detention centre classroom while three students formed a human wall between me and the altercation. The space was a mess and so was I. When the young men were pulled apart I left the room visibly upset. When I returned those three student-carers were working to organise fallen papers on my desk and putting the room back in order. This kind of care-reversal is something I have experienced and witnessed countless times in a variety of classroom settings. The truth that has been made clear to me is that the roles of student and teacher within the caring relation are ever impermanent. To facilitate the potential for caring relations to flourish in institutional environments Noddings takes great care to emphasise the difference she sees as existing between natural caring (the caring motivated by love or inclination) and ethical caring. If natural caring is the motivating force behind ethical caring then “natural caring is the cherished condition [while] ethical caring seeks to restore or replace natural caring.” Her argument is that such caring is “the social condition we treasure and want to establish or preserve” (p. xv) and that for young people “to develop as caring persons, [they] must have supervised practice in caring” (p. xviii). One of the caring skills that must be learned in supervised practice is to balance an ethical obligation to both caring-for and caring-about. The caring relation begins with one person caring for another who has expressed a need. The relation is completed when the cared-for recognises the efforts of the one doing the caring. This form of caring is a way of encountering others and its intimate nature makes caring-about the world beyond our small circles more complex. But not impossible! Looking back to the enclosed environment that was the detention centre, a facility that was dominated by a steady stream of strangers brought together for short stints of time under great emotional duress, the educational ideal of supervised practice in the development of caring relations should have been negated by virtue of its suffocating space. The nurturance Noddings writes of should have been impossible in a place that had been constructed so explicitly for purposes that had nothing to do with caring for or caring about others. And yet the narrative data from interviews with staff and residents, as well as the collaged shadow box frame, point to caring relations that existed in spite of the space.

1

A Wider Web of Care

What Noddings calls the “wider web of care” is symbolised in the collaged frame filled with fragments salvaged from the former detention centre classroom

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FIGURE 1 Shadow box frame collage using photograph, paper, staples (Natalie Davey, 2016)

where I once taught. But to see care or joy in this educational place requires one to train their eye on specific details (see Figure 1). For the collage background I used part of the envelope that had contained remnants from the detention centre. Those pieces of paper had been stored in the manila envelope for over a decade, lost in the bottom drawer of a desk I never used. The envelope signified how there was no blank canvas available for those whose educational stories would be layered on top of it. The words that I would affix to the envelope were loaded with meaning because of who and where they came from. The detention centre and the envelope itself had been spaces of enclosure and limitations. In the midst of taping the envelope to the interior of the frame, I had the choice to work and re-work its placement, finally choosing to leave the bottom left corner imperfectly askew. As a teacher who likes to feel in control of her surroundings, my tendency has always been to try and “fix” things. This quality of mine was challenged in every way during my tenure in that classroom. To

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honour the complex truths of our difficult stories of becoming, and for them to carry educational weight in their telling, I chose to leave the corner of the envelope askew as it had been first laid inside the frame, striving to visually mitigate the danger Arendt (2011) speaks to regarding a researcher’s potential to romanticise the experiences of criminalised youth and prison. Tucked just inside the envelope background I placed one piece of a fragment that I had discovered upon first opening its yellow flap. In the envelope I found three assignments from former students, as well as a journal entry that I had written at some point in my first year at the detention centre. I had jotted this journal entry down during a free writing exercise that I did with one specific group of students. The pen I used was a red ballpoint. I remembered having to ask one of the staff for a pen as there was nothing in my desk drawer to use since all of my allotted pencils were already in the hands of the students. For some reason I had a full group that day. No one was at court or with the psychologist or even a lawyer. No one’s family was visiting. With that red pen I had written a short description of an educational moment that had played out in class just a few feet from my desk. I had observed one small boy teach another much larger boy to use the alphabet in an effort to help him read. Many of the students struggled with literacy skills and these two were no different. The smaller boy suffered from sickle cell anemia and because of his size he was a favourite amongst the students and the guards. His diminutive stature made him less of a threat. Each time he was arrested and brought back to the detention centre, something that happened twice in my two years there, his littleness presented as a strangely welcome contrast to the hard lines and edges adopted by most of the other detainees. The bigger boy wore his hardened expression like a uniform, one of many coping mechanisms that were adopted for survival inside, and all the more, beyond detention walls. In red ink I had written about the smaller of the two boys writing out the alphabet on a piece of paper, and how the bigger boy’s stiff shoulders had softened a little as he moved his chair a little closer to his “teacher.” I described how together they sounded out each short word that the one had worked hard to make accessible to the other, doing so by writing them in large block letters. I must have written the journaled anecdote to save me from forgetting that the beautiful moment had happened. In those early teaching days, I did not have the vocabulary to express a fear of forgetting, but even then, I must have had some internal awareness of the fact that if I missed such an encouraging educational interaction, I would struggle to return the next day to work. My journal entry was an example of both teaching and learning, what my father called a “funding moment” for me. It described a moment of relational

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abundance that I could call upon in an educational space that was fraught with so many limitations. Such a funding moment had been sporadic in its appearance, just like the faces of my students, but it was there for the taking and receiving if I was clued in enough to witness its occurrence. With those students in mind, into the shadow box frame I tucked a part of my old journal entry, deciding to keep visible the red inked words “teacher” and “twelve-yearold boy.” While putting the frame together I reread the words I had written and still felt sure I knew who the “twelve-year-old boy” was. I was less clear about who the “teacher” was and continues to be. The act of framing the journal fragment points to how I have continued to grow and learn from the interaction between the two boys—their caring relation—with each other. And though this realisation was a positive experience in my own journey of lifelong learning, I have since had to wrestle with the fact that such a delicate moment of educational becoming for two young boys occurred in a detention centre, an inherently problematic space. Care theorist J.C. Tronto (1993) connects care to political power stating that, “[t]o address and to correct … problems with care … requires a concept of justice, a democratic and open opportunity for discussion, and more equal access to power” (p. 154). There was no access to power for those children in that basement classroom. Tronto’s ethics of care troubles what I am doing with Noddings’ work and that is an important interruption to acknowledge and sit with. The physical structure of the detention centre had contained teacher and students, just as the manila envelope contained the document fragments. From that perspective, care in such an anti-educational space was impossible. Acting as a metaphor for prison itself, one can imagine that for years those bits of paper had wasted away, lost in the bottom drawer of a desk. But from another vantage point, though, they were protected in a manila detention centre, waiting to get out. Tronto and Noddings have been used together in recent educational studies (see Joorst, 2021) suggesting the importance of digging deeper into care ethics in education as opposed to giving up when we have only just begun. Whatever truth is read into these fragments on their own, once framed together, the pieces contained within the envelope were translated into new pedagogical relations of care as they were cut and pasted atop that which had held them in and together for years.

2 1.

Reflection Questions for Educators Nodding says that the one-caring and the cared-for are reciprocally dependent and impermanent roles in terms of caring relations that play

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out in our lives. What role do you play in your life with those at school and at home? As an educator can you think of surprising moments where you have ended up being the cared-for? How has a wider web of educational care in your career maintained conditions that have permitted care and joy to flourish? What is the balance between the time you spend as the one-caring and the time you spend being the cared-for in your educational life? How can you work to bring balance into those relations?

CHAPTER 3

A Pedagogy of Care In the first two chapters we have looked at how care and joy in the educational context are nurtured through an understanding of both relational pedagogies and caring relations. This chapter takes us to the frontlines of educational care: the alternative classroom. Here I put forward a pedagogical model of care for K-12 educators that is specifically focused on alternative classroom educators, but suggest that this is a model that can truly be applied to educators across a wide spectrum of classroom experiences. Looking first at Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) “emotion work” in the context of alternative classroom teaching, a link is made back to Nel Noddings’ (1986) “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point. I then riff on psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother,” the one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world in which he or she will feel both cared for and ready to deal with life’s endless frustrations” (Alpert, 2019). Connecting Alpert’s mobilising of Winnicott to aspects of Noddings’ “caring relation” builds a theoretical bridge that supports and scaffolds the construction of what I call the “good enough teacher.” I look at how the “good enough teacher” might be a pedagogical model of care that supports the emotion work of alternative educators, all teachers with the desire to enact care-based pedagogies, and students who need to take care of themselves.

1

The Good Enough Teacher

There has always been a place-based duality to my classroom assignments. I have worn many hats over the years, sometimes all at once. In fact, no teacher has ever played a singular role in her capacity as an educator for in whatever classroom iteration one teaches there are competing forces at play. Students have needs, parental pressure is exerted at varying degrees and there is the never-ending top-down emphasis placed upon the facilitation of key outcomes regarding student skills. I share my experiences as a teacher because I believe that more attention in the educational realm should be placed on the emotional in-between space. This is a space that exists in the midst of curriculum delivery and skill development. It is in that space where teaching and learning occurs and it is there that educators are performing ongoing emotional work. The expectation that K-12 teachers simply know how to care for © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_004

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all of their students renders invisible the toll that performing such ongoing emotional labour takes on those who spend their days in the educational setting.1 Emotions must be considered work in order to obtain a fuller picture of what transpires between teachers and learners in the realm of public education, and a disservice is done to both parties when this labour is glossed over as obvious or natural. Without a pedagogy that is supported by an ethics of care, I believe that an educator’s emotional labour risks not only going unseen but also untaught, leaving teachers without the explicit supports to make the care they show to and for their students as well as themselves enough. In the two years I spent teaching at the detention centre no school administrator ever visited my prison classroom. The message delivered through their absence was that a teacher like me was on my own. Without school-based institutional supports, I was left to work with and care for my students while they took care of me. It was they who asked how I was feeling at the start of a day just as I checked in with them. In what was an emotionally charged environment, when moments of stress occurred in the classroom, students would work to protect me from violent words and actions even as I worked to create a safe learning environment for them. Retrospectively, I can see that the student-to-teacher caregiving I received in the detention setting was located in an educational grey zone that today gives me some pause. The hesitation I feel is not because there is anything wrong with young people showing care for their teachers. Empathy building is in fact a soft skill to be celebrated (Stanbury et al., 2009). Instead, where I believe the pause button should be pressed is on the false narrative that suggests teachers should not need such care. This false narrative says that “good” educators have it all together with (or more often without) support and such a myth is damaging. It is damaging for teacher-candidates who feel the need to be “experts” when they have barely graduated from teacher’s college (Allen, 2009). It is also damaging to young students who believe that their teachers know all and then feel crestfallen, betrayed even, when teachers inevitably fail them. What if, in those early days of my career, I had been given the language to describe the care I had needed to help sustain the difficult work of teaching in isolation? How would I have approached my students differently? How would I have approached a care of myself as an alternative educator? Former Halifax Poet Laureate and activist El Jones (2019) writes of her prison activist work that, “We can’t pretend this work doesn’t take a toll” (para. 6). Jones’ words resonate deeply with my memory of the detention classroom and of alternative classrooms in general, for inherent to the teacher’s role is the emotional toll taken on by the educator. I imagine the weight of this emotional burden to be heavier for those who work with and advocate for underserved

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students in alternative classrooms. When I look to the Toronto District School Board’s website2 to see how they define an “alternative” classroom I read a sunny description that states, “These are schools where students need a new way—to find their way.” I find this spin doctoring of language to be deceiving in the face of what I have experienced and what other alternative educators have shared with me of their classrooms over the years. Our shared stories fit with what Richard Ashcroft (1999) writes when he states, “Teachers who work in institutional or alternative community settings typically receive no special training intended to equip them to serve their often difficult-to-teach students” (p. 82). My experience of being hired without training for the detention centre position is a case in point. If “alternative” is understood by that which it is not—mainstream—then who is it that populates those alternative classrooms? How is an alternative student different from her counterpart in the mainstream classroom? Adam Jordan (2017) describes “alternative schools [as] popular interventions for marginalized students” (p. 263). These spaces exist to facilitate schooling experiences for students who are living on the margins, set up in places such as children’s hospitals, detention facilities, psychiatric out-patient facilities and group homes. Jordan goes on to note that little research has focused on professionals in these settings … [even though] close to 11,000 public alternative schools or programs are believed to exist in the United States education system (Foley & Pang, 2006) and as many as one million students are currently attending alternative learning programs [throughout the country]. (Lehr, Tan, & Ysseldyke, 2009, p. 263) In the face of such large numbers in the United States alone, the question must be asked how teachers are able to sustain the emotional work inherent to the success of their marginalised students in these outlying educational spaces when, as educators, their own formal and informal structures of care are so limited—or were never there in the first place? I return to research around teacher attrition rates3 in the first five years of the profession that suggest a stark truth that I have already emphasised. Teachers are not receiving enough care to sustain a long career and in the absence of care the whole system loses.

2

Building the Framework: Hochschild, Noddings and Winnicott

In her interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) about her recent work Carceral Capitalism, activist Jackie Wang says that she does not want to

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“glorify the informal structures of care that [end up] emerg[ing] in the crucible of a capitalist system that would grind us all to a pulp if it weren’t for our friends” (Buna, 2018). Wang says that her emotional support has to come from “informal structures of care” to sustain her activist efforts because she finds no systemic support available to her. Similarly, under the present government in Ontario, teachers and their students are living out dramatic governmental cuts to education that highlight a systemic will to withdraw supports from the ones who need it most. From this contextual ground I want to build up and frame a pedagogical model of teacher and student care. The desire is for this model to be more than an “informal structure of care” but something grounded in theory upon which to feed and grow. I begin with a reading of Arlie Hochschild’s “emotion work,” connecting that concept to the specific lived experience of an alternative education teacher, someone who teaches outside of the traditional mainstream school and so works without its inbuilt supports. Then I return to Nel Noddings (2016) and her “ethics of care” as a pedagogical starting point for a model to do emotion work differently. Finally, I riff on how Avram Alpert (2019) has taken up psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s notion of the “good enough mother” as one who “manages a difficult task: initiating the infant into a world in which he or she will feel both cared for and ready to deal with life’s endless frustrations” (“The Good Enough Life,” para. 3). Each of these thinkers helps to flesh out what I am calling the “good enough” teacher. Linking Alpert’s Winnicottian translation to aspects of Noddings’ caring relation, I sketch out my version of the “good enough teacher” to be a model of teaching and learning that supports all teachers, in this case alternative educators, in the balanced and sustainable practice of what it means to be “good enough.” I write from the stance as one who wants to be a better teacher than I was when I began. I want to be a “good enough teacher” with the experiences and nuanced vocabulary to better show care for others and for myself. I also consider the possibility of the “good enough teacher” as being a pedagogical model of care that is replicable by students to learn how to better take care of themselves. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Arlie Hochschild describes “feeling rules” concerning the “emotion work” that is owed from one to another in a wide range of social interactions. She explains acts of “emotion management” as determining the appropriate responses due to that range of interpersonal exchange. As observed in her study of public-contact workers, Hochschild’s consideration of emotion work becomes complex when feeling rules and the “gift of exchange” are centred in the work of those for whom interpersonal connection defines the job, for example the classroom teacher. Andy Hargreaves’ (2001) work on the emotional geographies of teachers in

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relationship with both students and colleagues highlights the complexity of that exchange. In his study of 53 teachers in a variety of elementary and secondary schools, Hargreaves’ interviews draw on “methodological procedures used by Hochschild” with the end goal being to highlight how “teachers draw upon [personal and past] emotional understanding … to interpret the emotional experiences and responses of others” (pp. 507–508). Megan Watkins refers to Hargreaves’ work, adding to the scholarship around teaching and emotion, in her investigation of teachers’ tears in the affective geography of the classroom. Watkins (2011) says it is “important to consider the particular spatiality of classrooms and how they function as affectively charged sites … contained spaces with a specific interiority where teachers and students are grouped together, interacting for sustained periods of time” (p. 138). The affectively charged site of the alternative education classroom warrants attention as the emotion work of teachers is unpacked. Not unlike the cramped space of the airplane where Hoschild’s participants worked, enhanced feeling rules dominate an alternative classroom’s very particular educational space. Even as these and other studies have taken up Hoschild’s emotion work in their classroom research, there are others who would disagree about using her concept in regards to teaching. In a literature review analysing 19 different educational articles focused on how Hochschild’s concept does or does not fit within the realm of teaching, Kwok Tsang (2011) highlights the complexity inherent in Hochschild’s term in the context of the classroom. Tsang ultimately boils the confusion down to interpretation of vocabulary, specifically looking at the difference between emotional labour and emotion work. I choose to use the term emotion work in this text to look more generally at how the practice of emotion management is key to a sustained career in teaching for alternative educators. I see that work of emotion management as an even greater quandary for educators whose classrooms fall outside of the traditional schoolbased support systems. Research that looks to the benefits of supporting teachers in their professional learning makes a direct connection to mentorship roles that are filled for new educators by more experienced teachers in their school communities (see Campbell et al., 2018). Such mentoring relationships are not easily formed within any school setting, for the emotion work and feeling rules at play are loaded with and layered by the complex relationships that exist within the school community. The student population requires ongoing care; collegial competition can rear its head in the form of workplace lateral violence (Davey, 2018b, p. 232); and administrative hierarchies further complicate the already emotionally-laden school environment. To find a healthy mentoring relationship outside of a traditional school in an alternative classroom comes with

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even more place-based challenges. For example, within the partnership-driven world of post-secondary education (PSE), an alternative classroom I found myself teaching in situated me on a college campus teaching parallel to but not directly with colleagues who were kept separate because of institutional divisions. I experienced those divisions making the feeling rules harder to decipher, and I saw the way they bred feelings of isolation and resentment in teachers. If, as Hochschild suggests, one can become estranged from the emotion work that is done on the job as a way to mitigate the stresses of that work, a negative outcome of that estrangement plays out in the reality that feelings connect us to those around us (Hochschild, 1983, p. 91). In the educational realm, emotional estrangement will have an impact on the student-teacher relationship, negatively affecting those students who are the most systemically underserved. As previously stated, many of those students are learning in alternative programs and classrooms (Bullough, 2005, p. 25). A “good” teacher will try to care for her students with all she has to give, but what is the end result for her and her students if she loses herself along the way? I believe that the “good enough” teacher will, instead, find a way to strike a balance between the work of emotion and care for both others and herself through a pedagogy of care. Carol Gilligan (1982) writes, “[T]he ideal of care is … an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone” (p. 62). Noddings (1986) builds upon Gilligan’s work and fleshes out a full-fledged “ethics of care” from the stance that, “One who attempts to ignore or to climb above the human affect at the heart of ethicality may well be guilty of romantic rationalism” (p. 3). Similar to Hochschild’s emotion work that is embedded in the very act of teaching, Nodding’s “caring relations” are intrinsic to classroom dynamics. The goal of a teacher is to respond to the learning needs of his students; and to do so requires engaging with, listening to and responding to those needs that the student names. The emphasis is placed on listening in the teacherstudent relation for “the teacher as carer is interested in the expressed needs of the cared-for, not simply the needs assumed by the school as an institution” (Noddings, 2012, p. 772). For a teacher working alone in alternative classroom settings with cohorts of extremely diverse learning needs, it is all the more necessary to hone an ability to respond with care for students. Without schoolbased institutional supports like guidance counselors and social workers, the success of the caring relation is dependent solely on the teacher. I see pedagogical potential for alternative educators within Noddings’ work when she defines the “caring relation” starting from her premise that “we recognize human encounter and affective response as a basic fact of human existence” (p. 4). Earlier I wrote that for Noddings, it is from a relational perspective

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that we are encouraged to study the conditions that make it possible for caring relations to flourish. This perspective, when brought into the alternative classroom, with her focus on the contribution of the cared-for to the relation, establishes the carer’s efforts as caring. Noddings uses examples of contributions made by the patient to the physician-patient relation and, in the educational space, the student to the teacher-student relation. In the context of my own alternative classroom teaching, the interchanging nature of carer and caredfor has always been amorphous. Who takes on the role of teacher or student in a classroom depends on many shifting factors in the lives of all who enter the educational space. To mitigate the aforementioned “grey zone” of studentto-teacher care, explicit guidance must be given; for example, asking students for help when maneuvering the physical space of the classroom or sharing with students small classroom-based administrative responsibilities. Sharing aspects of classroom work, be it arranging tables for a group discussion or crafting the first draft of an email to a group of students, makes more transparent the many micro-tasks that take up space in a teacher’s mind that need to happen to make a school day run smoothly. For students to take on roles as carers, Noddings (2003) believes that young people need “to develop as caring persons, [and so they] must have supervised practice in caring” (p. xviii). Noddings goes on to write, The caring attitude, that attitude which expresses our earliest memories of both caring and being cared for is universally accessible … [and thus] we must nurture that ideal in all of our educational encounters … The primary aim of all education must be nurturance of the ethical ideal. (p. 6) With Noddings’ words in mind, a pedagogical model of care extends that same need for a nurturance of care ethics to support teachers in training and educators in general. Attention is needed for support and nurturance to fill a gap that requires attention in the lived experiences of alternative educators for whom caring and caregiving should not be equated. Lobb (2013) writes of Noddings’ complex unpacking of care-giving as she works to dissect the concept of empathy through a critical feminist lens. She makes the point that empathy, like caregiving, is not implicitly selfless and points out that a recognition of what is received in the giving of empathetic care has the potential to benefit both parties. She leans on Noddings to make this point. Therefore, caregiving is an important element in care ethics but technically, as a set of activities or occupation, it can be done with or without caring. Teaching, for example, can be done with or without caring. It is only with awareness and acknowledgement of the difference between the two that the need for care support in education

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can be unpacked. It is at this juncture where I see a bridge to be built connecting Noddings to Winnicott. Again, it is important to note the distinction Noddings (1986) makes between caring about and caring for. Such a distinction is key when considering the function of institutions and large organisations in supporting caring. A traditional school, for example, or in the case of my alternative education focus, an off-site classroom, cannot necessarily care for everyone directly—or can it? Noddings (2003) would suggest that it can work toward “establishing an environment in which caring-for can flourish” (p. xv) but cautions that “a primary message of Caring is that we cannot justify ourselves as carers by claiming ‘we care.’ If the recipients of our care insist that ‘nobody cares,’ caring relations do not exist” (p. xxiii). When considering education, how do we “develop communities that will support, not destroy, caring relations” (p. xxiii)? My educational response to this question is inspired by Alpert’s (2019) reading of Winnicott’s “good enough mother” when he writes, “To fully become good enough is to grow up into a world that is itself good enough, that is as full of care and love as it is suffering and frustration” (“The Good Enough Life,” para. 3). Alpert’s summation of Winnicott’s important concept extends, in locus parentis, to a teacher’s desire for her students. The turn to a psychologist for pedagogical guidance speaks to the interdisciplinary impact of a thinker whose ideas have shaped and stretched processes of meaning-making across various fields. Steven Tuber (2008) writes, “ Winnicott evokes a parallel process in which reading his work resonates on multiple levels …” (p. 7). Setting the scene for his analysis of Winnicott’s extensive body of work, Tuber (2008) begins his primer by reminding the reader that Winnicott was first trained as a pediatrician before moving into psychoanalytical care. He writes of Winnicott’s certainty that “there was a psychology of babyhood, and that the baby was an inherently psychological being” (p. 18). An explanation of this infant psychology is unpacked in Winnicott’s paper “Primitive Emotional Development” (1945) where he describes what he calls the baby’s “instinctual urges and predatory ideas” of her mother’s breast. Tuber’s reading of Winnicott values the doctor’s reference to “urges” as “keeping true to his psychoanalytic training” but believes the addition of “predatory ideas” to be ground-breaking psychoanalytic language for Winnicott “giv[ing] the baby a mind and a motivational force distinct from his urges. Being predatory, moreover, implies being related and relationship-seeking” (Tuber, 2008, p. 19). Winnicott’s careful and deliberate word choice helps a reader to unpack what is a nuanced explanation of the paradoxical interrelatedness of the infant and the mother. The one needs and at the same time must learn to be without the other.

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It is from that paradoxical stance, in an effort to understand how the “good enough mother” is released from the unreasonable burden of perfection, that I find clarity in the words of Martha Nussbaum. She writes of Winnicott that “for him, [our central cultural and personal problem] is how to bear the exposure of being imperfectly human” (p. 388). Nussbaum suggests that Winnicott’s understanding of the relatedness inherent in the mother-infant dyad has “a distinctively ethical heart … for only through developing the capacity to imagine its mother’s feelings does the child become capable of generous and reparative acts” (Nussbaum, 2006, p. 389). Thus, according to both Tuber and Nussbaum’s readings of Winnicott, what makes the notion of the “good enough mother” and the mother-infant dyad a useful cross-disciplinary metaphor is its relatability. We are all imperfect and we all need care. From an educator’s perspective the ethical heart of Winnicott’s dyad forms a natural link to Nodding’s care ethic. I am by no means the first to work with the concept of the “good enough mother” in the teaching environment, nor to connect Noddings and Winnicott in educational research. Isca Salzberger, Giana Henry and Elsie Osborne (1993) look to Winnicott’s mother figure in their study of senior teaching staff who are interviewed in a counseling and education professional development course. Going into their sessions with the teachers Salzberger, Henry and Osborne (1993) wonder if teachers tend “to overrate or underrate the part they play in the development of their pupils” (p. 3). What emerges from their conversations with the teachers is an awareness in the interviewees of the shared human experience of anxiety that impacts both those teaching and those taught. That anxiety does not stop in childhood but continues to exist at some level throughout life is a surprise to some of the teachers. A psychoanalytic understanding of that anxiety is introduced to them via the teachings of Winnicott as he “drew attention to the need of an infant to be held both physically and emotionally by the mother” (p. 3). Within the counseling course the important role of the teacher is tied to Winnicott’s “mother” as the educator-participants come to see that “if painful emotions can be received by another [i.e. a teacher] and understood, it allows for growth and development” in students (p. 3). Guy Allen (2002) also interprets Winnicott in his own educational research as he incorporates the notion of a “good enough mother” with what he calls a “good enough teacher” into his pedagogical effort to change a university introductory writing course from the inside out. A professor of literature and writing, Allen (2002) sees his practice as a “good enough” teacher in the highly competitive university environment as “creat[ing] an environment where students can make meaning or discover for themselves” (p. 150). The “facilitating environment” that he can provide for his writing students depends on the

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“potential space” that is created for play, where “the ‘work’ of childhood” occurs (p. 151). Allen’s educational mobilising of Winnicott, specifically regarding the physical and psychic space of the classroom as well as the course structure, “depends on the ‘good enough’ caregiver making and maintaining that space” of both independent and creative play (p. 151). To ensure that his writing course is not simply “a space without potential” Allen says that a teacher becomes a “good-enough other [when they offer] the good-enough environment as setting the minimal conditions for the subject’s development of capacities for both autonomy and connection” (pp. 170, 173). The way that Allen utilises and applies the “good-enough” label to a teacher is pedagogically valuable in the writing classroom and I pick up on some of his ideas in my own work with Winnicott’s language. The way in which I am taking up the term “good enough” in relation to alternative educators shifts away from focusing solely on the role of the teacher. My turn to an ethics of care explicitly includes the student as herself being “good enough” and, in fact, necessary to the care that needs to be lived out in the classroom. A direct connection made between Winnicott and Noddings is found in “Transitional Spaces and Displaced Truths of the Early-Years Teacher” where Sandra Chang-Kredl works with “portrait segments“ of early-year teacher experiences framed by Noddings’ discussion of care in connection with Winnicott’s notion of transitional spaces. Chang-Kredl (2018) writes, “We all struggle with the demand of an unsettled subjective and social existence. According to Winnicott (1986), ‘relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience’” (p. 155). That illusory space of relief, what Winnicott calls the “resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated” is an intermediate area of experience that I believe, for the “good enough teacher,” is situated in the classroom (p. 155). Another example of Noddings and Winnicott being theorised in tandem appears in J. MacQuarrie’s (2006) “Against Interpretation,” where the author calls into question the “progressive approaches of education that encourage teachers to analyze and interpret as a means to an end of coming to know students well” (p. 40). She works with what she calls Winnicott’s “use of an object” and investigates teacher-student relationships through the lens of Noddings and other educational philosophers, suggesting that the “progressive” teacher’s eye has been analysing students instead of turning the gaze inwards where she believes it belongs. At the end of her article she conceptually marries aspects of both Winnicott and Noddings, telling a story of her own classroom where she cares for a student who, through his relational response to her care, chooses to care for her and himself in the process. MacQuarrie writes, “Our challenge

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as teachers, then, is to strive to always first be in relation with our students so that they may transform and flourish” (2006, p. 49). MacQuarrie (2006) and Chang-Kredl (2018) each focus on social interaction and interrelation as inherent to the teacher’s experience, and both gesture to care as the necessary centre of what they analyse to be healthy educational relationships. The interrelated and relation-based roles of Winnicott’s dyad are important to the development of my pedagogy of care since both characters play important roles in my educational interaction with his concepts. In my effort to connect the mother-child dyad with Noddings’ “ethics of care” and Hochschild’s emotion work, it is Winnicott’s “good enough mother” that grounds the development of a pedagogical model for teaching in the alternative classroom. Three quotations from Winnicott drive the pedagogical model’s development. The first is taken from his paper “Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development” (Winnicott, 1967). In what is essentially a free-verse poem, Winnicott writes, When I look I am seen, so I exist. I can now afford to look and see. I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive. The second quotation comes from his paper “Group Influences and the Maladjusted Child” (Winnicott, 1955) where he writes, I suggest that this I AM moment is a raw moment; the new individual feels infinitely exposed. Only if someone has her arms round the infant at this time can the I AM moment be endured, or perhaps risked. Finally, the third quotation comes from his paper “Mind and Its Relation to the Psyche-Soma” (Winnicott, 1954). In it he writes, “What releases the mother from her need to be near-perfect is the infant’s understanding.” Winnicott’s mother-infant dyad is defined by their interrelation: the new one sees himself in the eyes of his mother and therefore sees himself. He recognises his own existence. Not only does the infant recognise that he exists in her eyes, he can “now afford to look and see.” According to Winnicott that seeing means the infant can rest in the knowledge of his mother’s care and, therefore, take the risk to look beyond her face to “perceive” the world that he is now a part of. The infant’s perception of the world directly links to his apperception of his own existence by virtue of his mother’s care. The infant can then start to “creatively” make a place for himself in the world where he will not simply exist in it as a created thing but as a creator himself. All of this self-perception

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and awareness is connected to the care given to the infant by his “good enough” mother. She is the one who enables the “I AM moment[s]” to be “endured, or perhaps risked” by her child as he creates space for himself in the world, confident that her arms are always within reach. And the “good enough” mother is released from “her need to be near-perfect” because of the infant’s “understanding” of her care. The “I AM” moments of isolation, lived by both mother and child, keep them simultaneously together and separate, creating a healthy balance of care given and received. The pivot from psychoanalysis to pedagogy is educationally intuitive for one who learns and teaches in a non-traditional classroom. The ethics of care that Noddings has developed hinges on her notion of the “caring relation” and that relation, like Winnicott’s mother-infant dyad, is interpersonal. She believes that the one-caring and the cared-for are reciprocally dependent and in our lifetime we are all inevitably cared-fors at many times and, ideally, most of us are also carers. The reciprocal dependence that exists between teacher and learner in the alternative environment is the foundation upon which the pedagogy of the “good enough” teacher is built.

3

Key Tenets: A Pedagogical Model of Care

The key tenets of the tri-part pedagogical model are: 1. The teacher and student acknowledge their co-dependence for educational progress to be made in the classroom, what I call the “teacherstudent binary” (Davey, 2018a, p. 78). 2. The teacher strives for a balance of both student care and self-care. 3. The teacher facilitates space for students to creatively engage the educational process. These three tenets can be lived out by any “good enough” teacher—and I believe should be lived out for an alternative educator to do more than simply survive her classroom life. I suggest that it is all the more important for alternative educators to have this pedagogical foundation upon which to build a thriving teaching practice. If we want a teacher to last beyond the first five years while performing the profession’s intense emotion work, external and internal systems need to be put into place to make it possible for her to thrive in the long run. To help explain how this pedagogy might play out in the real time alternative classroom today, I find inspiration in the words of Gender Studies scholar Katherine McKittrick. In her exploration of colour and hue, inspired by singer

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Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues album, she writes, “We must live with seeing and knowing something (blue) that we cannot accurately chronicle or express. Put otherwise, the unexplained, the undescribed, unfold into a kind of promising inaccuracy” (McKittrick, 2020, p. 30). McKittrick’s description of knowing something that “we cannot accurately chronicle” speaks to my educational journey. I take solace in the “promising inaccuracy” of a pedagogical practice that strives for balance and self-care, brought about through both teacher facilitation and student engagement. A pedagogy of care holds within its very description a sort of impossibility, for certainly, like teaching itself, a balanced provision of care for self and others will be a very individualised practice as it plays out in the classroom. And yet, the definitive naming of such a pedagogical approach obligates a discursive awareness of the emotion work that occurs in alternative educative spaces. That awareness has the potential to facilitate a working through of the three tenets to be lived out by “good enough” teachers for whom, if an ongoing balance is achieved, may feel released from the pressure of doing educational emotion work in isolation. That release may then, in turn, create space for pedagogical growth in both teachers and their students. 3.1 Tenet One The first tenet speaks to the need for the teacher and student to acknowledge their co-dependence for educational progress to be made in the classroom. The “teacher-student binary” can be described as a gift that must be given and also received (Davey, 2018a, p. 75). The importance of this gift is bound up in the interrelational nature of the teacher and student as needing the other to exist. There is no teacher without the student and no student without the teacher. The emotion work that comes with teaching in the alternative classroom can feel all the more difficult because of the isolation inherent to the job. But if a teacher can see his students as partnering with him in the task of teaching and learning, his sense of isolation has the potential to be mitigated by an awareness of those who are there doing the educative work alongside him. An example of this tenet is found in the alternative classroom in which I taught and learned for five years. My student cohorts were made up of youth aged 18 to 20 years old, all who were completing different high school credits that were failed at one point or another on their individual academic journeys. Some had failed by a mere percent or two, while others had a long way to go to pass. The common denominator that cut across the 40 or more credits that needed to be recovered throughout the semester in our classroom was that I could not be a subject matter expert for most of what these students needed to learn. On my teaching certificate it says that I am an English literature teacher and a sociology teacher, not a teacher of math or science. But in my role as a

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credit recovery teacher my job description said that I was to provide the students with the necessary material for them to succeed in all courses. The gift of the partnership that was necessitated with this paradoxical set-up was that both teacher and student had to work together for the work would be impossible to complete without both parties involved. Students had to work with me to guide me towards their prior knowledge in a specific course that needed recovering. They had to direct me to resources they found effective and had to steer me away from those they did not like. Areas of subject specific interest had to be explicitly named by the student so that she might be engaged as we co-created new assignments for the credit to finally be recovered. A positive result that I experienced by acknowledging this teacher-student partnership was a lessening of pressure to be all things for my class—teacher, guidance counselor, social worker and lawyer. Because the student’s role was so key to the credit recovery process, other pressures started to be relieved. It was a cascade effect. Said another way, the credit recovery educator might ask herself, “If we are developing assignments as a team what else can I count on in terms of my students’ abilities?” In such a space the pedagogical paradigm shifts towards one that is strengths-based and away from a deficit mindset that is so often connected to “at-risk” students. 3.2 Tenet Two The second tenet that is built into a pedagogy of care necessitates that the teacher establish and practice a consistent balance of both student care and self-care. Current academic research and educational blogs speak to the need for teachers to practice self-care so that they can be the best teachers they can be for students. Jennifer Gunn (2018) emphasises the importance for teachers to work on “self-preservation mindsets” and “building a strong peer network,” both of which are good suggestions for all educators to work towards (Room 241). For alternative educators who may not have the possibility of a schoolbased peer network, self-preservation mindsets are necessary. At the same time, I would suggest they can be too focused on the “I” of the teacher without acknowledging the potentially positive impact of the student on the teacher. Even in the prison, working with youth who were deemed by the education and legal systems to be a hard-to-serve student population, students proved to be carers of me and of each other. For example, students would support each other in literacy skill building at one table, while I worked to quell any number of emotional crises in another corner of the room. The general understanding between us was that in our classroom there would be no fights, and throughout my two years in the prison there was only ever one. I look back to that time and see that, even in my naïve 22-year-old state, the trust I had instilled

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in my students had helped to set us all up for success. We relied on each other and were, therefore, a community of sorts. The second tenet of a pedagogy of care points to the “good enough” teacher’s balancing of emotion work that, as Noddings says, “develop[s] communities that will support, not destroy, caring relations” (p. xxiii). The balance of living in a world that is itself good enough, that is as full of care and love as it is suffering and frustration is connected to an emphasis on community. 3.3 Tenet Three Finally, community building is also inherent to the third tenet that requires the teacher to facilitate space for students to creatively engage with the educational process. Winnicott’s use of the word “create” gives power to the infant who is connected to and also isolated from the “good enough” mother. To create means having agency. For agency to play out in the lives of small alternative classroom student communities, teachers must release control over the care given and received by those students to each other and themselves. The students will become active participants in creating a class culture, for good or bad. From the stance of one practicing a pedagogy of care in her own alternative classroom, community-building means de-emphasising the “I” of the traditionally teacher-focused classroom by centring the “we” of teacher and students creating community together. An example of what comes from creating such community is examined by Paul Pedota who explores how teachers can support both the academic success and positive self-image of their students and how those benefits help support teacher retention. That pedagogical perspective aligns with what I am suggesting regarding the good enough teacher’s partnership with her students in the alternative classroom. Pedota (2015) writes, “It would do well to remember that we must look at the whole individual when planning how to support success so that the effort, energy, and persistence of an activity, for both students and teachers, will increase their performance and satisfaction” (p. 61). He provides ten strategies that I agree with in principal, ranging from establishing a supportive classroom climate to de-emphasising grades so as to emphasise learning “that has meaning to students” (p. 59). My focus on the student-teacher partnership falls within those quotation marks. Returning to the example of my credit recovery classroom, if we were to get the job done—that job being credit accumulation with the long game being high school graduation—for us to succeed as a teacher-student team we had to emphasise “that [which] had meaning to [my] students” and learn from each other. As the students guided me towards their prior knowledge in the subject, teaching me about what units or components of the course that

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they did not complete in their first attempt, we then built assignments from scratch that hit on those missing pieces. What we put together was essentially a course-based puzzle that simply needed to be completed. For there to be true buy-in from the student who had struggled academically in school, she had to feel heard in this process. A takeaway from this example would be that the student needs the guidance of the teacher and, equally important, the teacher needs the expertise of the student.

4

Barriers

One of the barriers to such a care-driven pedagogical mindset is that though school-aged students are no longer infants, as in the Winnicottian mother/ infant dyad, educational systems can and do infantilise their student bodies. Infantilising occurs in the teacher-centred negation of students and the potential of their creative power within the educational space. Once students enter their secondary school years where teachers are pushed to deliver content to satisfy top-down pressures from educational authorities, experiential opportunities for students to engage with their own learning disappear. The embedded importance of play that exists, for example, in Ontario’s 2016 kindergarten curriculum4 is essentially removed from curriculum documents by the time students have reached secondary school. That removal means students lose creative agency in their schools and classrooms. Recently proposed change to the Ontario Secondary School Diploma will require all students to take four e-learning courses to graduate.5 This top-down decision that is rife with inequities, means students will end up with less choice in terms of their academic electives, namely those courses that are often specialised and connected to the arts. With a care-based pedagogy front of mind, this example points to a systemic devaluing of student agency and an overall infantilisation of them in public schools.

5

An Anticipated Future of Educational Care

And yet, with some hope I return to Jackie Wang’s interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) where she describes her “interdisciplinary … approach to unpacking issues related to the carceral state [as a way] to attack a set of problems on multiple levels of analysis” (Buna, 2018). Wang is working to dismantle the prison system, while I am looking to present a pedagogical approach for isolated alternative educators, but perhaps the two ideas are not

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so far apart. Each one requires that systemic changes be made from the inside out. Be those changes from grass root social justice advocates or, in the case of a pedagogy of care where shift occurs within an alternative teacher’s own praxis, Wang’s desire rings true: we both point to the need for community and reaching out so as to “spark conversations and organizing efforts” (Buna, 2018). This chapter’s conceptual conversations with Hochschild, Noddings and Winnicott work together to add multiple levels of analysis needed in the realm of education for changes to occur. For alternative educators to practice a pedagogy of care, they need to look for support from unlikely allies who can help to attack the problem of isolated emotion work with the “promising inaccuracy” of a pedagogical practice that strives for balance, self-care, teacher facilitation and student agency in all classrooms.

6 1.

2. 3. 4.

Reflection Questions for Educators What has been “alternative” about your teacher experiences over the years? In whatever capacity you teach, what are some relational connections to be made between your educational life and the pedagogy of care presented in this chapter? What tenet resonates with your own practice? What tenet do you want to bring into your practice more explicitly? What gets in the way of trust (in your students, in your colleagues) so as to experience more caring relations in your educational life?

Notes 1 https://irinstitutes.org/teacher-emotions/ 2 https://www.tdsb.on.ca/High-School/Going-to-High-School/Alternative-Schools 3 The attrition rate in Canada can be as high as 30% in the first five years of service (Karsenti & Collin, 2013). 4 http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/kindergarten.html 5 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mandatory-online-courses-ontario-high-schoolstudents-terrible-idea-e-learning-1.5072018

CHAPTER 4

Radical Collegiality and Cross-Institutional Partnerships Thus far we have considered relational pedagogies and care in education through the lens of the teacher-student binary. I have shared anecdotal stories of how collegial care might be given and received, but in this chapter I take it one step further and delve into a study that brings to the forefront radical collegiality as a part of an educator’s relational praxis. I was introduced to the term “radical collegiality” when reading Vivienne Baumfield and Marie Butterworth’s (2007) research into school-university collaborative research partnerships. Spanning twelve years, Baumfield and Butterworth analysed “the exchanges between teachers and academics” in different partnership projects and applied Michael Fielding’s (1999) term “radical collegiality” to their cross-institutional research context (Baumfield & Butterworth, 2007, p. 411). As they worked towards “extend[ing] the idea of radical collegiality to encompass teacher to academic dialogue and exchange,” I saw a connection between their ideas and my own questions concerning collegial interactions as impacting educational care and program success (p. 412). At the time I was teaching in the SWAC program, a post-secondary pathways program called the School Within A College in Toronto, Canada. Referred to in Chapter 3, the students I worked with recovered incomplete high school credits and simultaneously took college credits that counted towards them earning their secondary school diploma. The experiential education program bridged two worlds—the public school board and the post-secondary polytechnic college. The dual credit college courses taken by the students were offered as experiential education opportunities, designed to give high school students a taste of “college life.” Though the courses were delivered by a college instructor to the high school students, the SWAC/Dual Credit experience was designed to ensure that both the college instructor and students were supported by a secondary school teacher to ensure success for all involved in the course.1 As one of those secondary school teachers, I had long intuited a connection between cross-institutional collegial interactions and SWAC/Dual Credit program successes for participating students. I worked to build lasting collegial connections with the college instructors who taught SWAC students over my five years in the program, which is what prompted me to look more closely at what the word supported means in the context of this experiential education © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_005

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partnership. Copious emails had been sent from management figures across both institutions describing all parties as “partners,” but to document how that partnership was lived out in real time required more than emails and my own anecdotal experiences. A college instructor colleague and I embarked on “An Exercise in Partnership” as we worked to unpack how the grey zone of support that secondary school teachers in the SWAC/Dual Credit program were tasked to provide was received by their partnering college instructors and their shared students. We wanted to gauge how the students experienced the cross-institutional partnership by asking if they had experienced benefits from educators working side by side and together? Did they see something akin to Fielding’s “radical collegiality” played out in front of them, and if so, did it support them in terms of next steps regarding their own post-secondary journeys?

1

Research Methodology

The research opportunity to examine “radical collegiality” in the SWAC and Dual Credit program arose when two instructors at the college were assigned by the institution’s Dual Credit office to teach the same General Education credit to two different high school cohorts. With the support of the college’s Teaching Innovation Fund, a colleague and I designed a methodology to investigate if and how “radical collegiality” was used to benefit both the teachers and instructors, as well as the students involved in these two courses. The twopronged research study was approved by the college’s Research and Ethics board, and was then enacted in the Fall semester of 2019. Our research question asked whether “radical collegiality” was a successful pedagogical structure for the delivery of these dual credit classes; did the partnership make both classrooms effective in terms of experiential learning for students in the process of facilitating collegial supports for the instructors? The data collected from the first prong of this study was mined from student surveys. A short online survey was disseminated to the participating SWAC and Dual Credit students2 that posed ten questions, asking them to respond along a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Some sample survey questions were: “The way the professor and classroom teacher worked together helped to support my learning needs” and “The professor and classroom teacher worked together to help me understand class assignments, tests, and exams.” The second data stream was interview-based. Two interviews were held, one with a participating college course instructor and the other with one of the secondary school teachers who was supporting the course. As researchers our roles were intertwined with the study and became part of the narrative

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analysis of the interviews, for throughout the research period I was a secondary school teacher supporting the SWAC program and my co-investigator, Katrina Gittens, was a college instructor with the SWAC/Dual Credit program. Example interview questions posed to the two educators were: “What stands out to you when you think back on the physical space of the classroom? Did this space feel like a “college class” for you? Why or why not?” or “Was this course different from your other teaching experiences? Was being a part of it a good part of your day? Please explain why.” We were aware that the use of sensory-based queries opened the door for questions focused on opinions and values as they “try to elicit more specific data about what is or was seen, heard, [and] touched” (Merriam, 2009, p. 96). In our double roles as interviewers and educators we asked those same questions of ourselves in the analysis of the interview transcripts, which added depth and breadth to the nuanced nature of all responses.

2

Fielding’s “Radical Collegiality”

To help analyse the two data streams we had to first decide what we meant by “radical collegiality” within the context of our study. Michael Fielding’s (1999) presentation of radical collegiality emerges from his critique of Judith Warren Little’s and Andy Hargreaves’ various works focused on collegial collaboration. Fielding developed his notion of radical collegiality to expand upon ideas that he feels are collapsed or undertheorised in their work. A key sticking point for Fielding is that, in his opinion, collaboration and collegiality are very different concepts whereas Hargreaves and Little have used the terms interchangeably in their writing. For example, Little describes collegiality as “conceptually amorphous” (Little, 1990b, p. 509) whereas Fielding (1999) separates the two concepts when he writes, [D]espite its collective surface, collaboration remains a form of individualism because it is, or could be, rooted in self-interest … In contrast, collegiality is both communal in its ontology and other-regarding in its centre of interpersonal attention: collegiality’s conceptual preferences valorise individuality over individualism and community over contract. (p. 6) Fielding (1993) appreciates Little’s notion of “joint work” as that concept “force[s] us to distinguish between collegiality as an occupational carapace and collegiality as a professional disposition linked to interactive, independent action” (p. 6).

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It makes sense that he appreciates “joint work” as it points to what he argues for in his own work: “a radical collegiality commensurate with an inclusive professionalism and the development of a more authentic, more dialogic form of democracy” (p. 3). Just as he does with Little’s work, Fielding’s engagement with Hargreaves is both parts complimentary and conflicted. He quotes Hargreaves who says, “Much of the burden of educational reform has been placed on [collegiality’s] fragile shoulders” (Hargreaves, 1991, pp. 46, 47). Yet, as he does with Little, Fielding struggles with some of Hargreaves’ chosen vocabulary. For example, Hargreaves (1992) presents what he describes to be five forms of teacher culture that he believes will “help us to understand much about the dynamics of educational change” (pp. 231–232). Two on his list are labeled “collaboration” and “contrived collegiality.” For Fielding, Hargreaves does not satisfactorily pin down what is meant by his chosen vocabulary. For example, the negative connotation built into the word “contrived” is understood by Fielding as essentially a form of managerialism, whereas the teacher culture of Hargreaves’ (1992) “collaboration” suggests something that “foster[s] and build[s] on qualities of openness, trust and support between teachers and their colleagues [who] capitalise on the collective expertise and endeavours of the teaching community” (p. 233). For Fielding what is key and runs counter to Hargreaves is the misuse of the term “collaboration.” In Fielding’s critique of Hargreaves’ terms, he asks, Would it make any difference if his third and fourth categories were to be called ‘Collegial Culture’ and ‘Contrived Collaboration’? I don’t get any clear sense of what the answer might be other than to assume that it doesn’t really matter, whereas, in fact, it does matter a great deal. (Fielding, 1999, p. 9) Thus, the specific word choice of “collegiality” is very important to Fielding because of its rootedness in community that celebrates individuality versus individualism. And where collegiality becomes explicitly connected to teaching for Fielding and other thinkers (Ihara, 1988; Sciulli, 1990; Waters, 1993) is when he writes of “the overridingly communal” nature of collegiality that makes no sense outside a way of life and a tradition which is expressive of collective aspiration … [that is to say] when teachers relate to each other as colleagues they do so in ways which are bound integrally to shared professional ideals. (p. 17)

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Thus, collegiality in the context of teaching is inextricably tied to the “collegium which provides the binding force and shared aspiration of their daily work, transcend[ing] the particularities and idiosyncrasies of specific schools in specific circumstances” (p. 17).3 This notion of the collegium as described by Fielding is one I will return to later in this chapter. Upon concluding his critique of Little and Hargreaves, Fielding goes on to flesh out his own ideas on radical collegiality in the realm of education, “namely an educational practice intentionally and demonstrably linked to the furtherance of democracy” (p. 17). Fielding writes, “I am arguing for a … redefined professionalism which, as Nixon et al. (1997) suggest, constitutes itself by ‘reaching beyond itself and by dissolving the traditional distinction between professional and non-professional’” (in Fielding, 1999, p. 21). Through Fielding’s argument for a redefined professionalism a solid link is formed between his work and what Gittens and I focused on with “An Exercise in Partnership.” Therefore, our study’s data analysis is framed by the three strands of Fielding’s self-described “advocacy” for radical collegiality as tied to democracy. They are: a. The expectation that teachers learn with and from each other; b. The view that “teaching is primarily a personal and not a technical activity and at the heart of the educative encounter there is a mutuality of learning between the teacher and the student” (p. 21); and c. The view that the collegium should include and embrace parents and other members of the community, those who “have for so long merited little more than contempt, indifference (cf. Burbules & Densmore, 1991) or the lip service of an unread and unresolved partnership” (p. 21). Fielding closes his argument by emphasising the importance of “reciprocity and energy of dialogue” as key to the possibility for radical collegiality to “transcend the coincidental” to be “intended and nurtured in such a way that the agency of all those involved is underscored and understood” (p. 28). Fielding summarises by saying, “Collegiality within education is primarily about the possibility of reciprocal learning within the context of shared ideals” (p. 29). The value placed on the importance of reciprocity and energy of dialogue is what grounded “An Exercise in Partnership” from data collection to analysis. By including this study in the larger relational context of a book that is anchored by both care and joy, I see potential for future discussions around radical collegiality and cross-institutional partnerships as real determinants for not only the success of programs like Dual Credit and SWAC but also the relational wellness of educators out there looking for pedagogical partners.

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3

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Student Surveys and Narrative Analysis of Participant Interviews

3.1 Strand #1: Learning with and from Each Other Fielding’s first strand calls “for teachers to learn with and from each other.” This strand emphasises the importance of educators being learners as much as they are teachers. The lifelong learning process for an educator must be centred in community for Fielding (1999), built upon “celebrating the necessity of professional equality as a central dynamic in an authentic, inclusive collegiality” (p. 22). Such an aspiration is nuanced in the context of “An Exercise in Partnership.” Fielding’s reference to the collegium, what Webster’s defines as “a group in which each member has approximately equal power and authority,” is muddy in the context of our study because of the roles that are not easily defined for the partnered educators from the college and public school board. Even though both institutions have technically laid out clear job descriptions for their members, on the ground within the SWAC/Dual Credit classroom the college instructor and the secondary school teacher must negotiate aspects of their roles to achieve a micro-collegium in their setting. From the student perspective, as noted in data mined from the student survey, almost 80% of students strongly agreed that their college professor and secondary school teacher worked together for their overall success in the course. 60% saw both college instructor and secondary school teacher as having worked together on student assessments. The chart in Figure 2 shows students saw both educators as valuable and working together, whereas the interview with the college instructor highlighted

FIGURE 2 Student responses—detailed

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the complexity of what “equality” looks like in the SWAC/Dual Credit classroom. The different perspectives shared by students and faculty interviewees point to the challenges of truly “learning with and from each other.” The narrative data mined from the interviews unpacks how colleagues learned from each other. Andrea4 was the college instructor I was partnered with for the Dual Credit class offered to our SWAC students. During the interview I asked how the experience was for her in working with a secondary school teacher to which she replied, Oh my god. I’d be dead in the water … It’s not harder having another person to work with because you’re so valuable to me. I wouldn’t be able to do this without you … because you have the [student] back stories. You know what’s really going on in their lives … I don’t know if this is maybe just what my professional background was, because I don’t come from a formal education background … but when I get an email from a student that says “I can’t come to class because there’s no money to buy food the last five days …” what I am supposed to do with their stories? I believe in fairness. Not equality. I don’t think you should just get a 50% for coming to class. I struggle in all of my classes because there’s always something. With SWAC it’s everyone. Because you’ve worked in this field for so long you get to know this [it] at a theoretical level that I don’t. But you also know these kids personally on a level that I don’t. Gittens and I were struck by the fact that the course was long completed by the time we had this conversation with Andrea and yet, in our interview, I so quickly fell back into the role of collegial encourager while posing the questions to Andrea. For example, my response to her ponderings about the student stories was to say, “It’s not useful to [the students] if it’s all one person …” I found myself working to remind her to see all that she had provided to the SWAC and Dual Credit students, with the hope that I might also shine a bit of light on what they had offered to her. A key different between Andrea and myself in our educator roles with the Dual Credit/SWAC context was that we came to our shared course with very different ideas and expectations. She saw the dissemination of curriculum content as her top priority, whereas relationship building was my focus. These were students who had been disengaged in their traditional high school setting but were flagged as academically capable and within range of graduation. When the SWAC students responded to her with the same wariness as many of them had done with teachers before her, Andrea had the wherewithal to recognise that something had to shift or she would “dread that class” till it ended.

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The experience of schooling had not been positive for most of the SWAC students, many of them marginalised and butting up against systemic barriers, so Andrea had inherited what were many negative coping mechanisms that the students had firmly in place. Because of their various issues that played out in challenging ways in their class with her, she welcomed the radical collegiality of my support. Gittens and I came up with the metaphor of a bridge as symbolic of the college instructor/SWAC teacher relationship. As Andrea’s secondary school support, I acted as a bridge that connected her to the students who she was interested in relating to but only from a safe distance on the other side. As the college instructor in her Dual Credit partnership, Gittens’ “other half” was Eva, a secondary school teacher. Eva began her interview session with us focused on the great opportunity she saw the Dual Credit experience to be for students. When we asked the question “Was this course different from your other teaching experiences? If yes, how?” Eva shifted her focus from student to herself and shared about her own learning in the Dual Credit course experience. She said, You have an opportunity to interact with a colleague. You have an opportunity to deliver curriculum in a different way. You learn as you go … I love co-teaching because it allows me to grow as a professional … I totally think this is an awesome experience for both students and teachers. Eva’s response emphasised personal growth, what she saw to be opportunities for collegial interactions, and co-teaching as benefiting both student and teacher. It is important to note that a place-based reality was lived out by Eva in her Dual Credit context; essentially the college came to her each week as Gittens traveled to the high school where Eva taught. This place-based reality was different from Andrea’s, who was teaching high schoolers on the college campus. She was as new to them as much as they were new to her and the post-secondary environment. For Eva and her students the only change to an already established routine was solely Gittens’ presence in their very familiar classroom. 3.2 Strand #2: The Mutuality of Learning As he defines radical collegiality, Fielding’s second strand takes the view that “teaching is primarily a personal and not a technical activity and at the heart of the educative encounter this is a mutuality of learning between the teacher and the student” (p. 21). This strand is the one Fielding assumes will be the most difficult for educators. Gittens and I felt an affinity with this component of radical collegiality perhaps because of our educational training and

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secondary school experience. As a high school teacher of 20 years, I have long recognised the need for students to be part of co-constructing the classroom team. In the context of SWAC and Dual Credit, I also noted that my partnership with the college instructors was tied to the ongoing relational work that my students and I engaged in. Gittens, a Teacher’s College graduate with a graduate degree in Education, brought a similar pedagogical perspective to her role as the Dual Credit college course instructor. As Gittens’ college counterpart in the study, Andrea’s educational background was strikingly different. Her experiences were in political and sociological spheres but not in teaching practices and pedagogy. Perhaps because of that background, as one who “just liked school and figured I’d be good at teaching,” Andrea spent more time in our interview trying to unpack what she felt the students should have been doing in class as opposed to what they actually brought to the experience of mutual learning. For a brief moment in our conversation Andrea paused and then acknowledged something positive about the SWAC students. She noted that with difficult subject matter they were willing to “become unfiltered” in class discussions. She commented, And it’s good right? Because it leads to conversation and I had one student today who commented, ‘I like that we can just talk about life stuff in this class.’ Through much of the interview Andrea was focused on the differences she saw in her SWAC students from those in her more “traditional classes,” but her awareness of their “unfiltered’ commentary in the college classroom is noteworthy. Almost begrudgingly, Andrea expressed what could be described as admiration of these students. That admiration was born of the radical collegiality that she and I shared but was also determined, according to Fielding’s second strand, by the give and take with her students. Andrea presented as an example of how a successful SWAC classroom was dependent on a teacher’s acceptance of self-reflection and personal learning, all the more for one who was new to teaching. Much like for Andrea, the “mutuality of learning between the teacher and the student” was not top of mind for Eva. In our interview Eva spoke at length about the benefits of the program for the students but her own personal excitement for the program stemmed from her experience of what she called “co-teaching.” She said, It all comes down to collaboration … I have learned things from [Gittens] in terms of challenges and struggles that different groups including

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minority groups experience … There’s a lot of collaboration that is going into teaching a dual credit course … and I know I’ll be reusing some of the things I’ve learned from her in the future. Absolutely. Though Eva made no explicit comments about her having learned from the students in the Dual Credit classroom, she did say more than once how much the students enjoyed the experience of having two teachers. She said, “They were looking forward to that experience” of having the college instructor join them each week. The enjoyment Eva noted in the students mirrors the enjoyment she named feeling herself in the co-teaching environment, pointing to the co-creation of an educational space that included the positive energies of both educators and students who filled out the space for her. The student survey suggests that students felt the need for both college instructors and secondary school teachers in the Dual Credit/SWAC program, and the students’ own involvement in their learning is also gestured to in the survey with the use of the word “access” (Figure 3). Whether the students recognised their own participation as having an impact on program partnership success, a narrative analysis of both educators’ thoughts read alongside the student responses points to radical collegiality as underpinning the learning process in the Dual Credit/SWAC program. Fielding (1999) writes that Learning and teaching are often at their most exhilarating and most demanding when there is a shared awareness that both parties can be

FIGURE 3 Student responses—overview

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both teachers and learners. On these occasions the collegiality consists in an acknowledged awareness of the possibility of mutual learning …. (p. 23) The dialogic encounters that defined for both Gittens and myself the structures and culture of the Dual Credit/SWAC courses were “an instantiation of the centrality and richness of different, which is, in turn, transformed into a complex, more demanding unity” (p. 24). Fielding used these words to describe one of his own school-based research projects and we saw those words as applicable to our study. The very differences that inform the lived experiences of the college instructor and the secondary school teacher, were: the basis of a transformative equality. In acknowledging the legitimacy and the special insight of different experiences of our daily life in [institutional and program partnership], in according them the respect they deserve, in feeling the realities of which they point, we come to learn from each other in ways which transform the routine expectations of teacher and learner. (Fielding, 1999, p. 25) In the context of our study there were no routine expectations of teachers and learners in what was, essentially, a program designed as an educational experiment. It was still deemed a pilot project eleven years after its inception by those who funded the program and perhaps there was good reason for that label. It verges on ironic that it is a program that serves students who know nothing of the college environment, run by instructors who have never taught high school students. Each time it has run, whatever pre-conceptions of schooling or learning expectations that might have existed in the heads of those involved in Dual Credit/SWAC, be they teacher and student, were disrupted quickly because of the participants’ inherent needs for each other to succeed. 3.3 Strand #3: Embracing Community Fielding’s third strand takes the view that the collegium should include and embrace parents and other members of the community, those who “have for so long merited little more than contempt, indifference (cf. Burbules & Densmore, 1991) or the lip service of an unread and unresolved partnership” (Fielding, 1999, p. 21). In spite of the ‘businessification’ of public and post-secondary education, Fielding’s end goal with radical collegiality is to present the possibility of “reconstructing education as a democratic project” (p. 25). He sees potential for it when

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schools … become smaller and more flexible, their boundaries more porous and more fluid, their view of community members more optimistic, more imaginative and more generous, their structures and cultures more dynamic and more dialogic, and their intentions unremittingly inclusive. (p. 26) Both data streams from our study point to the need to embrace members of a wider community as key to a program’s success. In the student survey we read the inclusion of “college supports, programs and services” as explicitly highlighting how the experiential education lived out in this program needed to include more than curriculum expectations for its student body to learn and grow. As well, what Fielding calls “the collegial imperative” means “draw[ing] strength from a growing knowledge base and the virtues of teaching as a public practice that extends far beyond the boundaries of particular schools in particular settings” (Nixon et al., 1997; Sachs, 1997, in Fielding, 1999, p. 22). Andrea, Eva, Gittens and I would not have connected with each other were it not for the SWAC/Dual Credit program. Though voiced differently by each of us, the interviews and our narrative analysis of them emphasise the drawing of teacherly strength that came from working in community.

4

Extending beyond This Study

The end goal of Fielding’s radical collegiality is a movement towards a tangible, real time experience of democratic education. Working in community, educators learning from each other and their students alike are all elements of the collegial experience presented by Fielding. I return to Baumfield and Butterworth, extending radical collegiality across institutional boundaries via educational partnerships. This is where “An Exercise in Partnership” inserted the SWAC and Dual Credit experience into the larger discussion around what collegiality looks like in educational contexts. The SWAC and Dual Credit collegial partnerships were, in our study, inherently radical as lived out by the secondary school teachers partnered with the college course instructors. Though job descriptions that defined roles played by both parties did not explicitly name collegiality as central to student and overall program success, the data collected in our study suggested otherwise. The ongoing nature of radical collegiality continued to play out beyond the study as Andrea, Eva, Gittens and I remained in educational conversation even as some of our roles within and relationships to the SWAC and Dual Credit program shifted. Gittens and I no longer teach in the SWAC and Dual Credit program.

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But even though we are not officially partners, we continue to check in with each other using email, text messages, and social media where our conversations inevitably skew towards the educational. Gittens and I moved from being classroom partners to research partners, while Andrea and I have remained in virtual collegial contact via LinkedIn. I have wondered if the radical connections made in the past have been sustained beyond the SWAC and Dual Credit classroom because of the democratically inspired work we engaged in before, during and beyond the study. Whether or not we have all shared the same views of or experiences in the classroom, the space of the classroom became a place of meaning making and collegial connection for us all. As we all continue to grow and our educational spheres of influence expand, is there more to be gleaned from the cross institutional experience of radical collegiality that we lived out together in that shared term? The ongoingness of radically collegial connections carves out space for care that is not shown through programs or the institutions that run them. Collegial care is determined by those who live it out in the classroom, perhaps in spite of the institutions, making it inherently radical and, in fact, necessary for student and overall program success.

5 1.

2.

3.

Reflection Questions for Educators According to Fielding’s three tenets, have you experienced radical collegiality in your work as an educator? How do you feel supported by colleagues in your day-to-day school life? Do you see yourself as more of an Eva or and Andrea? Do you generally feel excited about what can be created when colleagues work together? Do you feel a need for other colleagues to support your teaching efforts in school? Might there be a third option? Are you more like the authors, spending much of your time offering collegial support to others? If so, how do you create space for collegial learning for yourself? How does Fielding’s call for the collegium to include community voices sit with you? What can you do in your own educational environment— and in your own learning—to move closer to this democratic ideal?

Notes 1 In her report for the Conference Board of Canada entitled “Making the Connection: Growing Collegiality and Collaboration Between K–12 and PSE Educators” (2018), Elizabeth Martin,

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refers to examples of team teaching within Dual Credit programs at certain colleges in Ontario. My study of collegial relationships lived out within the SWAC and Dual Credit program does not look at courses that are officially team taught. The formal partnership here exists between the institutions of the school board and the college, while the collegial relationship developed between college instructor and the secondary school teacher is informally—but necessarily—constructed. 2 The survey was given by the college’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. Student participants were informed that they would receive a small e-coupon voucher as an incentive for their anonymous participation. Because of the anonymity of their responses, there were no foreseeable risks or discomforts associated with their participation in the study. 3 A collegium is “a group in which each member has approximately equal power and authority” according to Merriam-Webster. 4 All participant names have been anonymised.

CHAPTER 5

Finding Joy through a Relational Reading Practice Circling back to the beginning, where so much of this relational work of pedagogy and care began, I return to the detention centre and the shadow box frame I made while researching its closure. A/r/tographical work is inherently messy. As a multi-hyphenate art-inspired researcher and teacher, my educational past continues to catch up with me in every word I write. I was naive to have ever considered that project to be complete. Though the culmination of the work was the submission of my dissertation, the learning and my defense of that research has remained an ongoing process. In truth, I was misguided in

FIGURE 4 Annotated copy of shadow box frame collage © Natalie Davey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004547520_006

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thinking that the frame and its curated contents could ever present answers to big questions that remain heavy and loaded. Questions about the education of incarcerated and detained youth beget more questions about broken systems that create the conditions for a disproportionate number of young Black and brown children to end up on the inside. In fact, as soon as I started down that road, one might say that my posture of caring-for got in the way of my being a part of any true caring relation with the youth I once taught. In truth, because the cared-for from my past at the detention centre are no longer present to receive my proffered care, they cannot autonomously choose to accept it. There is no learner agency or even a student-teacher binary if there is only one of us left. Therefore, the only truly caring way to display the frame’s contents, what I prefaced this whole book upon, is to ask questions of it and accept that there will be no easy answers. The following list of questions connects to the annotated picture taken of the shadow box frame and its curated contents. These questions are asked of me, the curator, but also asked of the viewer who finds herself staring at the frame, looking to learn with it and to bear witness: 1. Who is the teacher in the frame? Biesta has emphasised that the language of education is a relational language. In the context of the detention centre’s past and present, the relational meaning embedded in the language of this question is key to understanding the frame’s narrative whole. 2. What is learned in detention and who does the learning? Biesta (2012) would say that the language my question is built around is flawed for “the language of learning is an individualistic language … it is a language that makes it more difficult to ask questions of purpose” (p. 12). Any answer to this flawed question would be too simplistic: Residents learned to do laundry. Residents learned to obey authority figures out of fear. If they listened carefully enough residents learned that, like them, other residents cried in the middle of the night. Staff learned to use the hierarchical power that is pushed down upon them from above. Teachers learned that “real” learning will happen when they get to teach in a “real” classroom beyond the walls of the detention centre. But if I reframe that question, I can ask instead: What is the purpose of education in detention? The answer to this question is much more difficult to live out but sits at the heart of what Biesta would call an educational “aim”—and that is to give and receive care. 3. Whose truth is curated in this frame? Whose truth puts youth behind bars? I ponder these questions in an attempt to problematise the notion that what is curated in this frame belongs to a group of learners. The intention built into the frame’s narrative construction was to present a restorying of many various truths. But if I accept that the truth in the frame

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is my own, then the answer to the second question “Whose truth puts youth behind bars?” is all the more painful. What must be accepted for systemic change to take place is personal responsibility. Nothing can shift in a society or a large system of power if the people who make up those systems claim that their truth or lived experience is too small to make a difference. For change to occur one must accept responsibility and only then is a movement forward possible. Accepting my own culpability regarding who it is that puts youth behind bars starts to makes space for a new truth. I put youth behind bars because I have been a teacher who worked within a system that separates and marginalises students who do not fit into certain social and economic boxes. The only way to curate a new truth inside an educational place like the detention centre’s shadow box frame is to break up and re-story those boxes. No matter how beautiful the light, is there hope for marginalised students beyond detention walls? I believe the answer is yes. There is hope to be found beyond the systemic loop that keeps some young people tied to the criminal justice system. And I believe that the answer is an educational one. For a student to educationally become through encounters with the Other, she must be given the space to pass time in places of meaningmaking. The light that shines in the top of the shadow box frame symbolises that hope. It is a light that will shine into any place that fosters the potential for educational encounters that are care and joy-filled.

Relational Learning through Relational Reading

Relational learning with this artefact from my teaching journey has required asking if the art of the shadow box frame could ever be cured of its “sickness” to become educational for others in the long term? Could its contents be reframed to act as a robust and healthy teaching tool? Zygmunt Bauman (2004) writes, “Stories are like searchlights and spotlights; they brighten up parts of the stage while leaving the rest in darkness. Were they to illuminate the whole of the stage evenly, they would not really be of use” (p. 17). Relational learning with the community of reviewers and presses who both appreciated and problematised my work with the detention centre meant accepting that no academic book could truly encapsulate such a loaded space. In the end, accepting that truth has been one of the most tangible educational examples of relational learning that the project even offered me. In its original form I had hoped that the re-storying of the detention centre’s educational life would work to humanise those detained students who had

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been relegated to the shadows. But for the sickness of the frame to be cured I needed also to humanise the teacher who was hiding behind her telling of their stories. Relational learning meant getting it wrong and then striving to get it right again and again and again. To learn in that way required the help of influential thinkers and philosophers, and a relational reading praxis to sustain my ongoing journey as both a teacher and a colleague. One does not simply enter their first classroom and become a relational teacher. All these years spent in classrooms, I continue to learn in whatever teaching position I hold, for a relational praxis is evolutionary. And an empowering truth to own is that as much as my growth as a relational educator is tied to the colleagues and students I work with, it is also determined by who I read and think with. I say that this truth is empowering because one cannot choose who one shares space with in an educational setting, but one has absolute agency over who they spend time learning from in the development of a relational reading practice. Philosophers and thinkers like Gert Biesta, Hannah Arendt, and Christina Sharpe, to name a few, have spoken into ideologies I have held to and they are to whom I return to ask questions of and disrupt those ideologies when they start to become too entrenched. The process of working though what Sharpe would call “prompts for thought” that I ask myself and others helps to sustain for me the life-giving—and equally energy-sapping— work of educational care.

2

Relational Reading with Gert Biesta

One of those key questions is “What is ‘educational’ in education?” In an ongoing attempt to answer this question, one that I find myself asking every month of August as I wrestle with the impending return to school in early September, I begin by asking first what is not educational? French philosopher Philippe Meirieu, translated and paraphrased by Biesta (2012), says an “infantile attitude towards education … operates on the assumption that the world is at our disposal and thus should obey our whims” (p. 36). I see the opposite of an infantile attitude towards learning to be one of educational maturity, and by maturity I mean that which necessitates looking beyond personal whims, beyond the self, to the Other. The sacred space of an ideal classroom has the potential to offer a reflective teacher and her students an opportunity to see beyond themselves. If seeing beyond the self is interconnected with educational maturity, what does it look like to see beyond the self to the Other? To see the self through the eyes of another? As a jumping off point, I turn to Biesta’s (2013) writing on

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the role of the educator with a focus on the teacher’s sporadic [sic] identity, “an identity that only emerges at those moments when the gift of teaching is [given and] received” (p. 54). This almost intangible identity is representative of a move away from the infantile towards the complexity involved in educational maturity or, at the very least, a more developed sense of educational subjectivity. To understand this notion of a gift exchange, the experience of becoming for both teacher and student must be considered. The world of education is made up of both; one cannot be without the other. The use of the word Other is here inspired by the work of Emmanual Levinas, as used in Biesta’s (2013) The Beautiful Risk of Education. When I first navigated my way through Biesta and Levinas together I was in the midst of trying to figure out what had been educational in the youth detention centre where I began my teaching career. I was convinced that something good had managed to emerge from a place that seemed, from the outside looking in, to be inherently anti-educational. But a problematic presented itself in my theorising, for I could not disentangle how the process of “educational becoming” was inevitably impacted for a youth in detention when the dominant lens through which she is judged upon arrest sees her as one thing first—a criminal. In fact, for Black and Indigenous youth in Canada that judgement begins long before a student is funneled into the justice system. So it is that for detained youth and for the educators and caregivers who work closely with them, the educative process of becoming is made all the more complex inside prison walls. Reading the work of Karen Till (2004) taught me that educational experiences occur in various unlikely places of teaching and learning and that the power of place-making is the beating heart of many truly educational narratives. Looking back on my re-storying of the detention centre, that narrative would be incomplete if York Detention Centre’s educational life was dismissed as something that had been lived but then, upon its closure, simply terminated. To limit the temporal power of educational place-making gives credence to an infantile attitude towards (and expectation of) the teaching and learning that were once contained in such a space. Unlikely educational places. Thus, my learning as a researcher-teacher has been guided by my process as a relational reader. In every classroom iteration I have found myself, I have continued to delve further into the question of what is educational in education through relational reading. I don’t stop asking questions once the school year has begun, for there are so many openings and fresh starts in teaching. There is the start of term, the start of a new unit of study, the beginning of a new book. Di Paolantonio (2015) suggests that “passing time” together is what gives the educational its power in that,

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education, in this sense, is the place and time where, through our passing time together, we can sense our exposure to the other and to a world that charges me and calls me out in a singular way beyond my own duration in myself. (p. 10) This movement away from an isolated focus on the self to what I suggest is a more mature and inclusive worldview is taken up when we choose to see the world as “exist[ing] independently from us” (Biesta, 2012, p. 36). With placemaking in mind, the experience of the educational could mean giving young learners, no matter where they find themselves, more than simply a space in which to learn or “do” school. Perhaps what is truly educational means offering a place in which to appear. If, as has already suggested, becoming for a learner means pushing beyond the lived boundaries of the self into encounters with the Other, in the context of education, it is through exposure to various curriculums, both explicit and hidden, that the boundaries of becoming are pushed in the classroom. Because the environment of education is so charged with meaning, it can never be simply a space or structure unto itself. The meaning-making that occurs within its walls makes it a place where students, and I also believe, teachers, make experimental entrances and exits, both literal and metaphorical, as they make their way towards educational maturity. Whatever opening is proffered to both student and teacher, be it the door of a classroom or the cracking open of a new text, the power of that which is educational shows up in moments of relational encounter, when places for appearance are revealed. Consider, for example, the disconnect between the static nature of “doing time” in the detained state versus Di Paolantonio’s “passing time” in an educational sense. Systems of training and “rehabilitation” fill the hours in detention as residents do their time, so to speak, but what is learned in this doing is not necessarily educational. To equate the two would be something Biesta (2013) would see as problematic and reading his work has helped me to flesh out my own thoughts as I balance agreeing with him while at the same time seeing something another way. Stories told to me in the interviews I conducted with former detention residents and staff highlighted educational encounters that occurred in the most mundane of spaces. Hallway lineups, moving from cells to classrooms, sitting in the cafeteria—these were threads of doing time and passing time educationally that became interwoven for the interviewees because of relational appearances made in those spaces. So many years later I can still turn to memories of sporadic gifts of teaching that were given and received in the detention centre and the many other classrooms where I have matured as an educator. Those memories shine a spotlight on the dynamic

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nature of the educational: moments of becoming in the midst of passing time together that supplant the mundane and static nature of content delivery and life skills training dictated by systems of power. In general, I agree with Biesta who is wary of what he calls the “learnification” of education, that being a mindset or perspective of classroom learning that looks to such training systems as valuable because they are determined by definitive outcomes and “measures of success.” Biesta’s understanding of the educational is inherently different from what he calls “a basic process of learning.” He would say that training systems are not educational in any way. Biesta writes about education as functioning in three key areas: qualification, socialisation and subjectification, and situates the first two in the arena of what is tangible, “the domain of knowledge and skills … [flanked by] encounters with cultures and traditions” (Biesta, 2012, p. 39). He then expands upon his consideration of subjectification using written “conversations” with different philosophers to tease out his thoughts. I appreciate that methodology. His writerly conversation with Emmanual Levinas and my own negotiations with Hannah Arendt and Phillip Meirieu have helped me to flesh out what I have witnessed as educational in education.

3

Biesta’s Relational Reading of Levinas

From a philosophical stance that is informed by Levinasian ideals, Biesta (2013) refers to students as subjects of action and responsibility (pp. 17–18). His mobilisation of Levinas in this way suggests responsibility to be an “essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” and he encourages his reader to consider responsibility in “ethical terms, that is, in terms of being made responsible and taking up one’s responsibility” (pp. 20–21). In light of education Biesta goes on to say of this responsibility that “what makes me unique, what singles me out, what singularises me, is the fact that my responsibility is not transferable”—and all of this is in relation to the Other. He writes that “subjectivity or subjectness … becomes an event: something that can occur from time to time” (p. 22). It is not to be confused with responsibility, which is already there: “Our subjectivity, in contrast, has to do with what we do with that responsibility.” Thus, Biesta explains that this Levinasian ethical subjectivity is “an ethical event, something that might happen, but where there is never a guarantee that it will happen” for such responsibility cannot be forced (p. 22). The Biestan notion of subjectivity connects to my definition of becoming and relational care as key to clarifying that which is educational.

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What this philosophical pondering means in my own relational encounters with students and colleagues looks different each time. Every ethical event in relation to the Other brings with it a possibility to find joy, but that joy is never guaranteed. Low-risk caregiving such as holding the door open for someone struggling with too many books or saying a polite hello to those I run into on route to a classroom takes little from me with the offering. But if I make the decision to engage in a conversation with a colleague who does not share my views on mask mandates or equity policies, the caregiving stakes are raised. The subjective experience of our relational encounter is not guaranteed to bring about feelings of care or joy. But in terms of risk assessment, I suggest that the opportunity for gain is greater in this encounter with the Other for having been offered than if it had never been presented as gift in the first place. Humility sits at the centre of every caring relation and it is there where joy can be found. For every relational “fail,” with each radically collegial moment of care first proffered but then rejected, there have been inadvertent gifts exchanged in the peripheral circle of care that surrounds the ethical event. That moment of vulnerability where I cried in my principal’s office so many years ago has remained a teaching moment for me and for those young teachers to whom I have shown care since. The same can be said of the caregiving and receiving lived out with students when humility is centred. I’ll never forget the graduation event where staff organisers trying to celebrate the students with party favours unintentionally caused harm with costume elements that the students rightfully pointed out to me in private were culturally appropriative. I promised the students I would speak to the organisers, knowing the potential for a defensive response was great. Instead, my colleagues found pedagogical joy in knowing that the students were having such thoughtful discussions and promised to do better in the future. The students and I were thrilled! The agency and Biestian identity that underscored the student leadership in that caring relation was complemented by the humility of the educators.

4

Relational Reading with Maxine Greene

Along with Biesta, one of the most influential thinkers I have centred in my relational reading practice is Maxine Greene. When my students have teased me saying I’m more of an art teacher than one of English Literature, I hearken back to Greene’s wisdom. She writes of the educational, and by extension, the social need to provide students with “occasions for significant encounters with works of art” to combat what Hannah Arendt calls “thoughtlessness” or

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“the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty” (Greene, 1995, p. 380). Arendt’s pushback against social thoughtlessness is “to think what we are doing” (p. 380). What this act requires, from Greene’s perspective, is a sort of thoughtfulness where learners find their way through to “make critical sense of what authoritative others are offering as objectively ‘real’” (p. 380). In the high school English classrooms and post-secondary education seminar rooms I have spent time in, I have witnessed first-hand how an application of Greene’s thoughtfulness honours the potential for critical thought and engagement that learners, especially young people, truly have. I have returned to a short story by American writer Aimee Bender time and time again because of the way it provokes emotion in me and then the group of students I am working with at the time. “Ironhead” is the story of a boy with the head of an iron who is born to parents who have pumpkin heads. They live in a town that does not tolerate such differences and so the family suffers, but the deepest hurt is experienced by the little Ironhead. The boy cannot sleep, an insomnia brought on by a deep sense of isolation even though he lives surrounded by a family who love him. The boy finally succumbs to his fatigue and dies and his family, along with the town at large, are left to grieve. The doctor says the little boy carried too big a weight for the size of his little body, referring to the head made of iron, but the reader of the story is prompted to spend time on that metaphor. I cry just thinking about this fictional character’s burden of loneliness because it conjures up memories for me of my cousin Joy’s isolation and fatigue. When I take the vulnerable risk to work through this story with the students, I know I will end up in tears, and yet again and again I choose to go to that emotional place because I know that the students have big feelings they also need to exit through their own stories. In the safe space of our classroom students share of various hurts and losses, amazing me each and every time by their world-weary wisdom and their willingness to engage with me and each other. Their sharing is Greene’s thoughtfulness in action. A recognition of human pain acknowledged by a group of young people, prompted by an impossible story. An absurd work of magical realism is made true in their connection to the text, to each other and to me. By adopting Greene’s perspective on art and thinking I have felt empowered as a teacher. Embracing the possibility of thoughtfulness in students has meant that I am not alone in my educative efforts. The student-teacher binary is rooted in collegiality and a sense of team (Davey, 2018a). In the “Ironhead” example I see Biesta’s focus on the subjective agency of students to be working in tandem with Greene’s taking up of the Arendtian

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call to “think what we are doing.” In an educational setting these two ideas are braided together when the student and her teacher come together to care for each other. Such explicit thoughtfulness, the opportunity to think what we are doing together, shows up in the pedagogy of care framework that was outlined in chapter three. Such a philosophy of teaching has sustained my work in some of the most underserved school communities in Toronto. When teachers and students are working with limited resources it only makes sense that they should turn to each other for support. That support is found in relationship with the other—and each other—but, as Greene points to, it is also found in art. Be it Bender’s short story or spoken words poems by Hanif Abdurraqib, such mainstays in my English classroom Greene sees as bridges to thoughtfulness. She writes of using a character from a novel by Albert Camus to exemplify the act of “thinking what [they] are doing” by pushing back against easy answers offered in the face of complex life problems. Greene (1997) says that Tarrou models how “we must be given opportunities to choose to be persons of integrity, persons who care” (p. 380). So what does Greene’s understanding of care look like in education? She suggests that Arendt and Camus’ character Tarrou see care as showing up in concrete and “plain, clear-cut language” (p. 380). Such language allows people to attend to what is around them, “to stop and think” (p. 380). For Greene that attending to is made possible in education through all art forms, be it the novel or drama or dance. She writes, To set the imagination moving in response to a text … may well be to confront learners with a demand to choose in a fundamental way between a desire for harmony with its easy answers and a commitment to the risky search for alternative possibilities. (Greene, 1997, p. 380) Of dance specifically, Greene (1997) writes that it “provides occasions for the emergence of the integrated self” (p. 381). She wrote “Art and the Imagination” in 1995 and yet I find her words so very responsive to our present day. She wonders at the necessity of the provision for the integrated self to emerge in the classroom because of the “peculiarly technical and academic time” she lived in. Yet, as we move into year three of a global pandemic and the coming technological days of web 3.0, I see a timely wisdom in her words. I am reminded of the line from the Coen Brothers’ film No Country for Old Men when one character says: “What we got here ain’t nothing new.” What she was writing in the mid-1990s is just as timely today as it was then, and so remains her philosophy for public education. Greene’s (2016) concern with “what a public philosophy of education might turn out to be” has inspired

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my own understanding of how such a philosophy can be lived out by educators and their students (p. 46). The heart of that philosophy is relationship. Greene believed that, “people become ‘human’ by means of communication and within matrices of relationship” (p. 48). Her vision for a public philosophy of education values nurturing intelligence and critical thinking with an emphasis placed on “a conscious attentiveness to the actualities of lived experience in the classroom” (p. 49). This conscious attentiveness, in theory, enables students to be “empower[ed] to interpret in … varied and complex ways” and therefore create what Hannah Arendt calls a “web of relationships” and therefore “a common world” (p. 50). For Greene this attentiveness would open up the space and opportunity to “live toward open possibility.” The hopeful tone of her philosophical offering is offset by a world weariness that underscores one of her last published pieces. Here she acknowledges the difficulty for ordinary beings trying to learn how to live together … to ‘be’ [when] in the background, sometimes confronted and sometimes denied, there is the ever present danger of nuclear holocaust, the possibility of losing what human beings have in common: their world, their human world. (Greene, 2016, p. 47) These words encapsulate the clear and present danger of our lives today. In the face of that danger all the more do I turn to her words of hope for education in my own praxis for, “Although we … cannot claim that schools have the capacity to ‘change the social order,’ we can affirm a continuity between the public space we would like to see and what happens (or ought to happen) in public schools” (p. 47). My desire to see a radical collegiality enacted within schools and across systems stems from this notion that there is a continuity, a thread even, that runs through all of our work in education. If we tug on it hard enough, we might find each other in the detangling process of educational care work. In my secondary school classrooms, as well as my time with faculties of education students, I have been deeply influenced by Greene’s work to introduce her own graduate students to a “realm of meanings” (2000, p. 271). For her this meant bringing to the educational classroom art works that would help her students to “see” as “they would not otherwise have seen, to make new connections with their experience that would disclose new meanings in their lives” (p. 271). Reading that Greene did with her students what I had been doing in my own classroom for years, long before I read her work, helped to validate my choices. That validation and continual learning in community is

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relational reading at its core. Greene influences me, and I strive to do the same with the learners in my space, who I hope will take that learning on with them into the world. I deeply resonate with Greene (2000) who writes, “Using novels and poetry, I discovered ways of doing justice to whatever might be called the historical record or the ‘facts,’ while working for the liberation and clarification of meanings regarding teaching and the school” (p. 271). Greene vividly describes a moment in Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz where a character, who is stripped of everything, including the chair she is sitting on, is tipped forward so that she falls to the floor. As she falls forward the character drops the tea cup she is holding and it rolls just out of reach. Greene uses that scene as a metaphor for the realm of education. To “recognize that there is something ‘out of reach’ is to commit oneself to the pursuit of possibility” (Greene, 1997, p. 394). Like my framing of the detention centre, the pursuit of possibility stems from a recognition that there is something out of reach. More questions must be posed of the work and of ourselves. Hope imbues the asking of those questions, for the learning begets more learning for both teacher and student. When one of my grade 12 students asked me why I used so much art in our English Literature class I brought up NFT s by way of example. It is still too early to determine how this internet-based visual art will be taken up and whether it will become the great equaliser that it is lauded to be in terms of art ownership in the online space. But I knew that my student would relate to the symbology inherent to this burgeoning artistic form. Greene (2000) writes of “the importance of the imaginative voice of the artist in human conversation” (p. 267). She calls them “cornerstones” and I agree. She sees in them the potential to bring about “reflective encounters for children along with the aesthetic necessary for the development of social imagination and the development of an articulate public” (p. 267). My student and I unpacked how even the idea of NFT art is a part of the educational conversation we need to be having because its symbols point us to the world outside our own experience. Throughout her writing Greene makes explicit who she sees to be missing in conversations that determine the direction of public education, calling out “the exclusion of women’s voices, working class voices, the voices of the oppressed” (p. 268), and she looks to art to aid in her ongoing effort to speak truth to power. To highlight her call for “a multiplicity of voices” in the educational conversation Greene calls on poet Derek Walcott’s words who writes, “To have loved one horizon is insularity … it blindfolds vision, it narrows experience” (Walcott, 1987, in Greene, 2000, p. 269). One young man who I taught in a high school English class 15 years ago recently sent me an email. His words came out of the blue for me, but in what

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I gathered from his message, it was an email he had been wanting to send for a number of years. He wrote that high school had been hard for him and one of the emotional anchors that kept him from self-harm was our class together. “Memories of watching the movie Goodbye Solo and talking about it with you saved my life more than once. My counsellor has encouraged me to share with people who had an impact on my life and you’re one of them.” When I read those words I was undone. The year I taught that student had been a difficult one for me personally. I was in the midst of a divorce and attempting to navigate a new life where I was both teacher and landlord to young college students who were renting out rooms in the basement of my already small home. To keep the house, I had to wear many hats, and the learning curve for renovating my life was steep. I felt very much alone. I do not remember the specifics of watching Goodbye Solo that day in class but I have no doubt that sitting at the back of the room, where I would have hoped no one could see me, I probably cried as the movie played. For this man, now in his thirties, to reflect on his life and remember the educational space that was our English classroom as a place of care is certainly heart-warming. The relational learning, though, extends beyond his memories as they become entwined with my own. We were both learning of ourselves in that space through art and dialogue and mutual care. Despite our individual hurts, a relationship to text and to each other trumped pain. My relational reading of Biesta and Greene, among so many others, has provided more than just a few philosophical theories to ponder and apply in my role as a teacher and learner. It has not been a linear process as I continue to be changed by the reading and rereading of their works and those of so many others. I have found that the hunger to learn and grow is something I must nurture or apathy can set in. Fatigue in a care-driven profession is real and difficult to manage at the best of times. The temptation is to rest on what I already know or have read. But there is joy found in what I read, and joy again when I learn something new that I now get to share with students or colleagues. Those relationships that drive my return to the classroom each day mitigate the temptation to rest on past and limited knowledge. Finding joy in the stories of others, be they philosophers or fictional characters, builds and supports an educational praxis that takes a teacher-learner beyond the self to encounter the Other—a sustaining process in which I have found great care.

5

Narrative Compassion: Putting Biesta and Greene into Action

A tangible way to find joy as a teacher has been found for me in fiction and the culmination of that joy is found in sharing with students what I call narrative

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compassion that is embedded in literary themes and modelled by fictional characters. As much as I am enlivened by the time spent thinking through problems for thought with the learners, where I am often surprised by joy is in the midst of my own learning while preparing for class. The relational connection made with the fictional text is something I get excited to share and that excitement sustains me as I give of myself to the students. The following are experiences I have lived out with different learning communities throughout my career. Learning to translate the written word, let alone the actions of people around us, are lifelong processes that need to be scaffolded. According to Judith Butler (2003) the stories we tell—and read—are necessary to a growing self-awareness for “at the most intimate levels, we are social” (p. 32). Because of that sociality, she writes: “I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is in the enigmatic traces of others” (p. 32). With the help of fiction, I have tried to translate for students the complexities of knowing the self in a Biestian sense in relation to others, starting the process by learning about compassion. When working with senior year secondary school students, I have often turned to Aimee Bender’s short story “Off.” It tells the fictional tale of a wealthy young heiress who is invited to a party by a friend. The story takes place at the party and is told from the perspective of the protagonist who gets progressively more intoxicated throughout the event. It is a story of loss, art’s ability to shed light, and the importance of a compassionate knowledge of both self and other that Butler refers to. “Off” is written in the first person, allowing the unnamed protagonist to voice her observations of the world around her. Her critical tone dissipates into a manic and painfully transparent vulnerability with every glass of wine. Her inebriated transition is shown in the text as paragraphs get longer and punctuation slowly disappears, until the last two pages are voiced as stream of consciousness. Via quotation analysis that can be done in large or small student groups, a read-aloud of the protagonist’s narrated experiences of isolation brings compassion to the fore in secondary student readers who might be living in a state of isolation in their own school environment. They are surrounded by peers but wary of who are their true allies and friends in the midst of crowded hallways and classrooms. I read parts of the story to the class and then we discuss key moments such as when the protagonist and Adam, her former lover, meet up for a brief moment in the bathroom and kiss. The protagonist believes that “[he] has the same feeling I do; he felt the room change into a different room during that kiss but I’m trying to get back to being in the first room, the one where I know it all” (Bender, 2006, p. 38). In my classes I have heard the students audibly react to the protagonist’s decision to reject Adam post-kiss who then calls her cold.

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Following their vocal response, we read the following quotation together as a class: I am a not-cold woman … [but] I exit the bathroom after I’ve used it and [a] lady is standing there and she is embarrassed and I am not and I step on her foot as I walk out and she says, ‘Oops, sorry,’ like all women do and I am mad at that because it was my fault so why is she apologizing? and I hate that she said ‘Oops’ in that meek voice and now I’m in a bad mood. (Bender, 2006, p. 39) We discuss the protagonist’s inherent loneliness, the reasons left to the reader to infer as the story progresses. We learn more about her when the protagonist remembers, in her intoxicated state that I used to paint and I would make landscapes that were peaceful and my teacher would stroll through the easels and praise me and say, ‘What a lovely cornfield, dear,’ but she never looked hard enough because if you did you would see that each landscape had something bad in it and that lovely was the wrong word to use. (Bender, 2006, p. 33) The protagonist’s paintings were filled with subtle images of violence, knives in the guise of cornhusks or a sunny beach scene where a towel is laid out next to a loaded machine gun (p. 33). Her art teacher never looked closely enough to see the paintings for what they really were, adding to the protagonist’s feelings of isolation from the world in which she lived. The readers then learn that the protagonist’s connection to Adam stemmed from his ability to understand her art: [T]he reason I kept going out with Adam in the first place was because when I showed him my painting of the ocean in the living room, on our second date … he looked at it for about one second and said, ‘Lady, you are screwed UP.’ I was ridiculous with gratitude. (Bender, 2006, p. 45) Though our class has been given a chance to pre-read the story, it is within the group reading of these specific quotations that the students take the opportunity to respond with compassion to the character. The vulnerability of the protagonist offers them an intimate knowledge of her—and potentially themselves. The story ends with Adam discovering the protagonist in all of her awkward vulnerability sitting, small, in front of a piece of art. She describes the moment saying:

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I stare at the wall directly ahead. There’s a painting of a desert hung up. It’s in a simple wood frame and in it there’s just a row of cacti and then the sun setting in the distance and who needs weapons when they’re cacti. That’s all I’m looking at when Adam takes my hand. (Bender, 2006, p. 47) The desert painting acts as a portrait of the protagonist. Her modus operandi, her prickly nature and shored up defense mechanisms, cactus-like, are presented within the wooden frame. When this quotation is read aloud, I have heard students exclaim with feeling, “Yes!” Student readers are aware that when Adam touches her hand this is the moment in the story where the singular “I” has become a “we.” Social connections beat out isolation. When secondary school readers end up rooting for such an unlikeable protagonist, they are living out compassion for the Other through short fiction. I have shared this literary exercise with teacher candidates, pointing to how the fictional story enables student learning of compassion for others and the self. Because fiction offers distance from parties, room is provided for learning what might be called a compassionate vocabulary. Scaffolding the process of learning to translate both the written word and the actions of people sets young people up for success. It is a lifelong learning process. As an educator, if I get the chance to compassionately recognise and be undone by the Other alongside my students in the hope-filled reading of a text like “Off” I see more potential for the impossible possibility—for the “I” to truly become a “we.”

6

Compassion, Joy and Relational Care

Whether the goal of teaching about compassion with the “Off” text was ever fully realised, what I know for certain was that I found joy in the effort. The relational reading and learning done in preparation for our classroom encounters always energises me, readying me for the relational teaching that will occur no matter what text we discuss. I take care of my teacher self by honouring the student in me, the lifelong learner who needs to experience care to keep on giving that care to others. The radical collegiality of writing this book picks up on the same joy and care found in my desire to both share and live out narrative compassion. There is inherent vulnerability in sharing one’s learning process. There is risk involved and sometimes the outcome can be painful, like it was with that principal so many years ago. But because of the potential for joy, it all feels worth the risk. In my first staff meeting as English department head I distinctly remember one teacher who kept his back to me as I gave a short introduction. He was

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older, had been teaching for many years, and was making a point with his body language. What was there to learn from me? It was only after the meeting that he turned around and finally introduced himself. Something akin to respect had been earned. In the years spent in that department he would always bring a too-sweet Moscato wine to our staff get togethers at my home, which was what I like to think of as a small gesture to say that he was on team. The vestiges of old hurts that initially had him feeling wary in our first encounter were no longer there. The timing of educational appearances—mine to him and his to me—were not aligned, but vulnerability, compassion, care and joy were found in our search to the find the Other in each other. It has taken two decades of educational life to accept that I am a learnerteacher first, more so than a teacher-learner. It is the learning that fuels in me a desire to return to the classroom year after year. Be it found in conversation with philosophers I read or with colleagues and students I engage with, my own reading and learning sustains a joy-filled teaching praxis. There is joy found in my evolving caring relations with members of an expanding learning community. There is also care shown to me by the texts I read, as well as in the spaces I both enter and exit. My task is to remain malleable enough to turn around, like my colleague did so many years ago, and accept what is offered.

7 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Reflection Questions for Educators Building on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, what is illuminated when some stories remain in the shadows of your own teaching journey? How might a relational reading practice help to support you in your educational life? How can you experience relational care from a book? According to this chapter it is possible. Do you believe in that potential? How can you test out the veracity of that potential? Who are two thinkers or writers who have influenced your teaching practice? Who are two thinkers or writers you want to include in your relational reading future? What would you say to the teacher you were two, five or ten years ago, having now read more deeply of pedagogical care and the potential for joy?

CHAPTER 6

Finding Joy How to Be Good Enough beyond the Classroom

My cousin Joy inspired the title for this book. Her name is a word that presents as adjacent to care, but to determine if that is true—and what might be added to caring relations in the educational realm via its inclusion—requires a closer look. Would pedagogies of care be enhanced through joy-filled experiences in the K-12 classroom? How do joy and care connect in the larger realm of education in and beyond the classroom? Joy is a concept that has been studied in the fields of literature, theology, and more recently the field of Positive Psychology. A recent and comprehensive literature review (Johnson, 2020) brought together a wide array of interdisciplinary studies to help clarify what joy research looks like to Positive Psychology scholars. The review caught my eye for it emerged from a field I was first introduced to when studying teacher care. A Positive Psychology pioneer Martin Seligman’s “Authentic Happiness” survey informed my first foray into educator care research. Thus, it felt apropos to return to Positive Psychology all these years later in my effort to define educational joy. Johnson’s review begins by defining joy in his own context as a Positive Psychology scholar. His initial move is to veer away from defining joy as a fixed state of one emotion to focusing on the possibility of simultaneous experiences of joy and other emotions such as sorrow. He finds that joy is not produced voluntarily and links the term with gratitude; further, he connected it with building up people’s resources for survival. The conclusion of Johnson’s review is that joy is both energising and “provides the motivational resources to act, to intervene, to improve. Joy is also often contagious, it involves transference as we share and spread [what he terms] “other-embracing joy” (p. 23). The notion of other-embracing joy, a person who is action oriented and able to simultaneously hold multiple emotions, aligns with my presentation of educational care. That alignment prompted me to dig further into what it might mean to embed joy into my pedagogical framework. I stumbled upon the work of Finnish researchers who investigated shared joy between teachers and students in an ECE (Early Childhood Education) setting. They prefaced their work by approaching joy as a relational phenomenon. A dialogic philosophy and a narrative approach to researching joy were used in their effort to see how

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the emotion emerged in teacher-student relationships. What the researchers have called a relational phenomenon links to what I have termed the studentteacher binary; one does not exist without the other. In the end their study revealed that dialogical, joyful encounters do not occur due to purposeful planning. “Instead, they require that teachers value the daily, bursting-forth moments as important spaces to create reciprocal, respectful relationships with children” (p. 1). Because their analysis cohered with the care-based relational pedagogies I propose throughout this book, I was driven to further consider joy’s place as a key component of educational care. The inextricability of joy from my framework for educational care was confirmed by William Paul Simmons’ (2019) Joyful Human Rights. Turning the paradigm of human rights education on its head, Simmons looks to joy as a pedagogical tool. He uses joy to reframe a conflating victim narrative of human atrocity to present, instead, a more nuanced and empowered story of a global fight for human rights. That reframing of joy, made action-oriented through its narrative power, was echoed in another study I came across in my reading. In concert with all that I had learned of educational joy, reading Hendrix-Soto’s Youth Participatory Action Research Project in Critical Literacies Instruction confirmed joy’s place in my work. Their study looked to joy as a critical part of youth engaging in literature, and as a former English literature teacher, I have witnessed first-hand what the researcher shared of young people finding their way into critical action through literature. The joyful possibility that emerges from that action is that they might find hope for what Hendrix-Soto calls “justice in their local worlds” (p. 1). Therefore, it turns out my cousin’s name holds more weight in this educational story than simply anchoring its title. I gained clarity once I pulled the thread and connected an action-oriented, other-embracing joy with the educational framework for relational care. With the right emotional tools and relational allies, it is possible to find joy in and beyond the classroom.

1

Pedagogies of Care and Radical Collegiality in the Virtual Classroom

What lies at the heart of both care pedagogies and radical collegiality is a humility that frees educators to be their best selves in and beyond the classroom. If, as Fielding writes, teachers are to learn with and from each other and view the heart of the educative encounter as inherently mutual, the growth potential for learning between the teacher, the student and the larger collegium would expand.

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The virtual classroom has been a testing ground for this ideology over the last three years in both my capacity as an adult educator and within the K-12 sector throughout Covid lockdowns and subsequent hybrid classrooms. Lessons learned in the virtual space can help educators to shift their understanding of what care might look and feel like, not just for students but for themselves. If care can be shown in classrooms where we cannot physically meet, how much more can care and relationality impact those spaces where we can? My first online teaching experience was spent supporting faculty through the Centre of Teaching and Learning of a college located in Toronto. I was hired to facilitate online content that had been designed in-house for college faculty members who were deemed “content matter experts” but not necessarily trained in educational pedagogy. Full time professors of the college were required to complete the teaching certificate that would, in theory, mean they had been exposed to basic tenets of curriculum design and teaching philosophies. My job was to monitor posts and discussions, engaging with learners in text-based conversation as they read and then responded to course material. But instead of students remaining focused on basic teaching practices like backwards planning and ongoing feedback, the participants drove our discussions in a different direction. Their posts became platforms for sharing anecdotal frustrations with what they had decided online teaching was—a space that was amorphous and difficult to manage, a content delivery system but not a community. Their frustrations have since been echoed by many well-trained teachers who have felt forced into online and hybrid classrooms in response to Covid. Throughout the pandemic teachers worldwide have been challenged to reconfigure what student engagement looks like in a classroom space that is dominated by black squares on a grid. Returning to Fielding’s radical collegiality as it is tied to educational experiences of relational care, I suggest that the virtual classroom space presents us with opportunities for humility-driven pedagogies that create communities unto themselves. These communities are made possible because the students are required members in terms of their facilitation. When the student body becomes part of the larger collegium in support of classroom community building, everyone in the virtual space benefits. As teachers learn with and from each other, be it about how to work zoom meetings or uploading large files to the cloud, students observe collegial care in action and then model that care with and for each other. The heart of the educative encounter is inherently mutual, says Fielding, and that interplay means removing ego from the equation as we enter the great unknown that is the virtual classroom, striving to figure it out together.

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So, what might humility have looked like for the college’s Faculty? How could they have put the idea into action to have made their virtual classroom experiences more positive? I offer three practice responses: a. Let go of control. If an educator can release herself from any concern over student control, such as whether cameras are on or off, that teacher will find herself more focused on the people who are ready to learn. The relationality inherent in the student-teacher binary will show up in conversation with the people who exist behind the black squares on the screen. If we acknowledge to ourselves as educators that the medium of video presents an assumed intimacy that cannot be forced, that recognition will open up the space for the teacher and student to search for and find the innately human in the other. The one caring and the cared for can still come together in the virtual classroom, but trust must be earned. In my two years spent online with grade 12 students I spent most of my energy focused on the chat box for that was where classroom banter, and therefore community, occurred. As soon as I shifted my focus away from what the virtual classroom was not, towards making it what it could be, my energies were rewarded with relational encounters that had me laughing out loud! Much humour can be found in the youthful colloquialisms bandied about in the chat if an educator lets loose the reins and engages in a new way. b. Ask students for help. As an experienced teacher knows to do in a traditional classroom, a virtual teacher might ask for volunteers and give out tasks. Instead of writing something on the board for the class, a teacher can ask a student to be in charge of the Zoom white board while another student is given the job of internet fact checker. We have different tools available to us in different classrooms and we are missing opportunities for connection if we do not use the tools we have in front of us! In the online classroom holding onto any vestiges of seeing oneself as the knowledge holder must be released; Google is the great equaliser. If we embrace that reality and give a student volunteer the power to fact check as a lesson ensues, so many learning opportunities will be presented for them and their classmates about teacher humility and digital literacy. As educators we can find such freedom in knowing that our job is to teach learners how to make the best use possible of the knowledge engines we all have access to. Critical literacy training is the heart of what the virtual classroom is made for! c. Try new things (and fail spectacularly)! Trying out a new technology can feel scary because as educators we want to feel competent and inspire confidence in our students. And yet, what we forget is that if we are

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creating caring relations within the teacher-student binary, we need to make space for the learner to take risks herself. If she is going to do so with confidence, the process needs to be modeled by the educator. Some of the best projects I have ever received from students have emerged after some of what I felt were my most disastrous technological fails. And yet, inevitably, a student will share with me that she was inspired by whatever platform or article or media piece I had brought to the table. The lesson learned is that students will practice what we preach. If the message that educators present in the online classroom is that it is a safe space to try new things, there must be exemplars shown of that safety in action. These are just a few ideas to bring caring relations and radical collegiality into the online classroom. The most important takeaway from these ideas is that humility and care shown will beget more care. Both teacher and student involved in the caring relation, working together to create community in whatever classroom iteration they find themselves, will find it in each other.

2

Pedagogies of Care and Radical Collegiality beyond the Classroom

The educational world beyond the formal classroom is a big one. Moving across the educational spectrum, there are alternative learning spaces for young people and adults, as discussed in chapter 3. But moving further away from schooling writ large, the language of teaching and learning has been adopted in many different environments. In museums and art galleries there are whole educational departments working to communicate place-based ideas that need to be taught and learned. Other teaching and learning environments, be they nonprofits, communities of faith or grassroots organisations, do much the same. When companies use the language of education to communicate messaging to their employees and even, perhaps, the consumers who are willing to pay for their product, the vocabulary of caring relations and radical collegiality is not necessarily top of mind, but perhaps should be in terms of the overall health and well-being of the community that said company wants to create and sustain. The truth of there being cared-fors and those doing the caring in every space, as well as the need for collegial support systems to ensure care gets lived out in healthy ways by all, must be named and valued for learning to occur. How does a company or organisation apply pedagogies of care to their work environment and make them mean more than simply “be nice” strategies between employees? What does it mean for an organisation to apply pedagogies of care and radical collegiality to their overarching philosophy so as to

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find joy, just as teachers strive to find it in their classrooms? That joy is found in relationships. The care and collegiality inherent to organisational success is relationally-based, just as it is in the classroom. The relational nature—that is to say the reciprocity and the humility that underpins a working team in a healthy work environment—requires trust and risk-taking. Trust, in a relational sense, goes back to the good enough mother (or teacher) who trusts herself to have given the child all the tools he needs to claim agency over his decisions and then move away from her embrace. That space in between the catch and release is relational care in action. For a company or organisation to bring about this care means providing tools and supports to team members and then trusting them to handle the independence of their own next steps. Risk-taking means stepping back and letting those next steps happen. Uppermanagement must offer direction but simultaneously throw their hands up and say to their employees, “But I cannot do any of this without you!” They must take the risk to believe in their team, and their big vision, so that those who have been taught can now claim space as they take the opportunity to show what they have learned. The language of teaching and learning, of relational care and collegiality, is nothing more than empty words if there is no opportunity for the learning to become doing. Two examples come to mind. For three years I was Chair of the Board for a non-profit in Toronto. The centre provided children and youth programming in an underserved area of the city, and it housed a food bank in the back of the building. The Executive Director and I had been friends since we were kids ourselves so taking on this role was as much about supporting her as it was the centre. I knew her strengths not just as a professional but also as a person beyond the job, and that inside scoop enabled me to offer relational care and support that filled in gaps by calling on the abilities mined from the rest of the board members and beyond. Radical collegiality in that relationship looked different from what I experienced in my school-based role as a department head. As chair I could not step in and support in the ways I was used to, by ordering supplies or running to the book room to gather texts for an overwhelmed colleague. I could not offer the E.D. such tangible, actionable supports because I did not have the skill set to do so since the world of non-profit navigations was outside of my purview. Yet, what I could offer was perhaps more important: I had the clarity of vision, and the emotional distance from her internal day-to-day challenges to offer gentle prompts for change. I had insights to offer concerning her relationships with immediate staff. I could also offer perspective when it came to those distant granting bodies whose rejections or biting feedback felt so personal to her. My prompts towards perspective and change were both enabled and received

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because of the caring relation that existed between us, not because of the role I held on the board. Though we had a personal history to build upon, the care fostered in our Board Chair-Executive Director relationship can be emulated by anyone in a leadership role if caring relations are valued and sought after in the collegial environment. Relations within any iteration of team or leadership composition must be cared for and nurtured for radical collegiality to take root and then grow into something sustainable. The goal of relational sustainability is just as important when it comes time for a change in leadership, as I experienced in my own role as Executive Director of the African Diaspora Youth Conference. For six years I led a large student-focused educational conference that brought Black youth from Toronto to the University of Windsor, a city in Ontario with historical roots tied to the Underground Railroad. Those who escaped slavery in the United States, making the dangerous trek towards anticipated freedom in the north, found refuge in churches and homes in parts of Detroit and Windsor, bordering cities with deep roots tied to this historical narrative. The conference was delivered by multiple partners across various school boards and hosted by the university. There were many moving parts involved in planning a conference attended by more than 300 hundred youth and 100 faculty. The investment of time and energy was incalculable. As such, after six years at the helm, I knew that it was time for someone else to take the lead. But passing that torch meant finding someone who would and could care for all of the conference’s details. How to trust that the traditions would continue in the hands of someone else? I had to release control and to do so required finding someone who would care for the success of the conference, but also care for me! Self-care is an over-used term that is bandied about lightly by too many in educational circles, but the deeper meaning of the term is nothing if not complex. Biesta makes central both identity and appearance in the educational realm, and what is the self if not a sense of identity? A recognition of who one is when looking into the mirror? That mirror might be made of glass, but it can also be found in relationships. This mirroring occurred with the Executive Director from the non-profit, who recognised her own limitations though the lens of our relationship and what it was able to reveal. Thus, in the search for a new conference leader my experience of self-care meant looking for aspects of myself in those I had shown care to over the years, just as they had done for me. Self-care meant looking to colleagues whose pedagogical stance mirrored aspects of my own, and seeing new qualities I did not have that they could bring to the conference to sustain and even grow it for new groups of students and teachers to learn from. In the end, radical collegiality and self-care

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appeared to me together in a friend named Joy. The beautiful irony of concluding this book with this story is no accident. That she and my dear cousin shared a name meant that finding Joy was truly a moment of relational care embodied in a colleague with a radical spirit through and through! Such happy accidents are possible, as is the educational possibility imbued in the act of relational care with students, colleagues and community members. The truth of the student-teacher binary means humbly considering who is the teacher and who is the learner in each and every situation. Engaging in relational reading practices, the ongoingness of philosophical self-examination, and asking the questions that do not always beget easy answers all require a searching out of the words and wisdom of sometimes unexpected colleagues both in writing and in person. Joy can be found in and beyond the classroom. We simply need to care enough to find it.

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Index alternative educator 24, 34 a/r/tographical 5, 54 becoming 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 21, 58–60 Biesta, Gert 3, 5, 7, 55, 57–62, 66, 77 care-based pedagogies 23, 38, 72 care-for 2, 3, 10, 11, 13–15, 17, 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 32, 35, 52, 63, 77 caring relation 2, 13–18, 21, 23, 26, 28, 34, 55, 61, 75, 77 collegium 44, 45, 50, 52, 53, 72, 73 community vii, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 25, 27, 37, 39, 42–45, 50–52, 56, 64, 70, 73–75, 78 criminalised youth 20 curation 55, 56 detention centre 4, 5, 10, 11, 17–21, 24, 25, 54–56, 58, 59, 65 educational care 2, 8, 9, 11, 22, 23, 38, 40, 57, 64, 71, 72 educational philosophy 4 emotion work 23, 26–28, 33–35, 37, 39 ethical caring 14, 18 Fielding, Michael 3, 40, 42–45, 47–52, 72, 73 “good enough mother” 2, 23, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 76 Greene, Maxine 3, 61–66 Hochschild, Arlie 23, 25–28, 33, 39

interrelational 35 joy vii, 1–3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 19, 23, 44, 54, 56, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69–72, 76, 78 narrative 6, 11, 18, 24, 41, 45, 46, 49, 51, 55, 58, 66, 69, 71, 72, 77 Noddings, Nel 2, 7, 13–18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28–34, 37, 39 Nussbaum, Martha 31 partnership 3, 9, 28, 36, 37, 40–42, 44, 45, 47–51, 53 radical collegiality vii, 3, 40–44, 47–52, 64, 69, 72, 73, 75–77 relational care vii, 60, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78 relational pedagogy 2–4, 6–13, 23, 40, 72 relational reading vii, 3, 54, 56–58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 69, 70, 78 Social Emotional Learning (SEL) vii, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 student agency 38, 39 subjectivity 5, 13, 58, 60 SWAC/Dual Credit 3, 40–42, 45–53 teacher-student binary 35, 40, 75 Winnicott, D.W. 2, 23, 25, 26, 30–34, 37, 39 witness-learning 5

Finding Joy

Finding Joy

CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE FUTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education Natalie Davey

Finding Joy offfers readers the opportunity to spend time with educational philosophers like Gert Biesta, Nel Noddings, Michael Fielding and Maxine Greene. A relational reading of education-adjacent thinkers like D.W. Winnicott and Martha Nussbaum also point to the work that must be done to sustain and grow a thriving collegium in a changing world. Using narrative interviews and a/r/tographical research to help unpack what care looks like in education across various sectors, this book suggests that collegiality and care are required for the support of both teachers and students.

Natalie Davey

Natalie Davey

Cover illustration: Band Instruments, by Joy Elizabeth Kim

Finding Joy Radical Collegiality and Relational Pedagogies of Care in Education

How can we manifest more relational care in education by harnessing joy in the school setting? Finding Joy suggests it is found in care-based pedagogies, radical collegiality and relational reading practices. Guided by philosophical conversations with educational thinkers whose works have informed the author’s own praxis over a twenty-year career in public education, at the end of each chapter the reader is given provocations for reflection through a series of questions.

Natalie Davey, Ph.D. (2016), Yorkville University, teaches in the Faculty of Education at that university. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in North America and internationally.

CRITICAL ISSUES IN THE FUTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

ISBN 978-90-04-54750-6

ISSN 2542-8721 CIFL 25

Spine