CARING in the Age of Coronavirus — by Greg Chalfin On March 10, 2020, I turned in my dissertation to my graduate school committee at the University of Northern Colorado. Three days later, our school, Stanley British Primary School in Denver, Colorado, closed for the rest of the academic year. Like everyone else, we had no idea what exactly to expect on the roller coaster to come. A few weeks into the pandemic, I successfully defended my thesis on Zoom. Entitled “Caring about more than grades and test scores: The work of reputationally caring teachers,” my qualitative research study examined the narratives and experiences of four teachers in four separate educational environments spanning the worlds of independent, public, and charter schools. The participants of the work were those teachers in a school that everyone can’t stop talking about. When you ask a community member about a teacher who goes above and beyond in having a positive impact, students, parents, colleagues, and administrators repeatedly bring up the same names. Over time, by reputation, they earn trust in a community, and trust begets immense impact on student learning, social-emotional health, and in becoming a joyful, lifelong learner. When I began the study, I expected to find that the teachers had some special method of how they assessed their students. One does not often find ideas of care intermingled with assessment practices, and I sought to learn more about how these teachers navigated the world of metrics and measurement that has enveloped much of K-12 education. What I found, however, was that the way reputationally caring teachers approached assessment had little to do with assessment at all. In practice, these “reputationally caring” teachers approached all aspects of their work as empathic mentors. These teachers aren’t just teaching, and they aren’t parenting our students. They are doing something in between. Caring for their students is as central to them as breathing, eating, and sleeping. They understand boundaries, but they see themselves as more than only a student’s math teacher. Frankly, for these teachers, it’s the only way they know how to orient themselves to their work. As the pandemic has raged on, I’ve been thinking about teachers like my study’s participants and about how hard it has been and will continue to be for so many teachers to feel fulfilled through a screen. When caring for the whole person, when believing relationships between students and teachers are immersive and continuous, when taking on the emotions, weights, and even traumas of their students, teachers struggle to sleep at night under the best of conditions. A pandemic like this one only exacerbates the weight on those caring individuals’ hearts.
Summer 2022 The Journal of the Progressive Education Network PEN 23
