As humans, we have an obligation to care for ourselves, for each other, and for the world, but how can we create, enter into, and support caring relationships in post-secondary institutions? Educational developers, like teachers, have an ethical responsibility for demonstrating care in our work to improve teaching and learning with ‘loving the learner’ being our motto (Rogers & Webb, 1991). As people working in different educational development roles (Curriculum Consultant, Educational Development Consultant) at a large research intensive post-secondary institution in BC who hold the values of caring, service, and relationships as a priority, we are exploring questions including: How do we operationalize care in our work? How is care operationalized in the types of questions that we ask in our work?
Building on the work of scholars who have explored an ethics of care in relation to education (see Noddings, 1988, Rogers & Webb, 1991), we provide some reflections on how an ethics of care is present in our own practices (and where it is absent or under-developed), in order to share how an ethics of care can be operationalized in educational development. Drawing on the literature, we also present practices that support enactment of an ethics of care in education and specifically in educational development. These include aspects such as modelling, dialogue, practice, continuity, reflection, and continuity (Rogers & Webb, 1991).
In this session, participants will be invited to explore how care is/could be operationalized in their work through discussing questions such as: What does care look like? Does showing care mean the same thing to everyone? Twenty years into the future, what might caring look like in post-secondary education?
This session is of interest to educational developers, staff, students, and administrators who have a desire to explore the ways that the principles of caring can be incorporated into practice. By the end of this session, participants will have been introduced to ways that care is (or could be) demonstrated in the field of educational development and they will be able to articulate several practices that support an ethics of care in post-secondary education.
