Caring teaching and the complexity of building good relationships as pedagogies for social justice in health and physical education
This paper draws on Noddings (1999) theory of care and data from classroom observations and interviews with 20 high school HPE teachers in Sweden, Norway and New Zealand to demonstrate how caring teaching and building good relationships may be used by teachers to both embrace and enact the social justice agenda in HPE.
The data clearly showed what most HPE already know- that teaching aimed at building “good” relationships is fundamental to pedagogies for social justice in HPE.
The sub themes highlight three key ways in which HPE teachers build relationships.
1) Knowledge about the students on a societal, group and personal level:
Teachers from all three countries talked about the importance of knowing their students. On a societal level, this included knowledge about the contexts that students live in, for example, to understand the implications of socioeconomic differences.
“I know for some of them [the families] financially it is not possible [to buy a PE uniform], and so I am not going to punish them because they can’t afford to buy … a uniform.”
On a group level, knowledge involves knowing how students interact and function with their peers. Sometimes this involves ignoring behaviour that may be considered as less than focussed on learning;
“Some of the boys in this class take different roles, pretending to be someone else, as in a play. Sometimes it is Ok for kids be kids”
On a personal level, focusing on the individual and seeing each student as an individual were reported as important by the teachers. Strategies included:
“knowing students by name, knowing their family members or collaborating with other teachers to learn more about them”.
2) Reflecting on individual,environmental and relational aspects:
Reflection is another key factor required for building good relationships. Reflecting on individual aspects refers to reflections on how to empower students, to make all students feel competent,focusing on “silent” students and the individual rather than the group (gender,ethnicity, etc…) they belong to. For example, one teacher brings up an example of “we have girls here that connect with the boys and that are maybe more one of the boys than one of the girls…”
Reflecting on environmental aspects involves facilitating good, inclusive learning environments where students feel safe. For example, peer learning was used as an example to strengthen the learning environment.
Reflecting on relational aspects refers to both the relationships between students and the power dynamics in the student-teacher relationship. One teacher spoke on the importance of not taking “power to their head” and instead having students “understand where [he] is coming from”.
3) Caring teaching strategies: planning, caring actions and doing “the little things”:
Planning teaching activities by incorporating knowledge and reflection helps foster strong relationships, for example, by having clear objectives shared with students at the start of a lesson followed by a clear sequence of relevant learning activities to help students learn how to work collaboratively.Caring actions were also employed by teachers, such as providing additional support to students, acting almost as a parental figure. Students coming late to class exemplified a possible caring action - instead of publicly pointing out that the students were late, include them naturally in the class.
Doing 'the little things' represent an overall ethos of care. The little things include:
● Saying “hi” to the students
● Using names,
● Sitting down on their level when speaking
● Forming and being part of the circle
● Being positive and encouraging
In the Swedish context, some teachers incorporated physical touching, such as hugs, as a means of showing students that they care about them and to provide comfort and confidence building.
The paper concludes that to develop good relationships a teacher must:(1) actively attempt to develop knowledge about their students, (2)deliberately reflect on aspects of building good relationships and (3) convert this into good caring teaching strategies. Although caring teaching is a complex practice, the paper provides good examples of how teachers can establish relationships as key foundational practice for social justice.
