Picking up on a fairly recent post dealing with the motivations of teachers, I'd like to consider care as a virtue. I'm currently reading Ivanhoe and Walker's collection, Working Virtue. The book includes a chapter from Nel Noddings entitled "Caring as Relation and Virtue in Teaching". Care ethics as a normative approach uses the term "care" in a broad sense, but there is a virtue sense of care. As Noddings points out, when we say someone is a caring father, or a caring coach, or a caring teacher, that person exhibits a particular virtue that is connected in a variety of (often complex) ways with other virtues. I will not discuss all of her points with respect to care and teaching, but Noddings does address four components of moral education from the perspective of care. My reading is that what she has in mind here is moral development in terms of developing caring relationships, and the virtue of care.

Component 1: Modeling
Teachers should model what it means to care in all that they do. In attempting to motivate students, pedagogical style and method, curriculum, and evaluation, teachers should be showing students what it is to care. And we should do this even when we are angry, disappointed, or tired.

Component 2: Dialogue
Through actual dialogue, teachers can come to understand the expressed needs of their students in order to respond to those needs in a caring manner. Engaging in dialogue and fostering the sort of environment where it can occur will require other virtues, such as paitence and open-mindedness. We should show our students how to engage in dialogue, and give them opportunities in class to practice it.

Component 3: Practice
Teachers should give students chances to practice caring. This could be done via small group co-operative learning, with the teacher reminding students that their role is to help each other.

Component 4: Confirmation
For Noddings, this means to bring out the best in one's students. We attribute the best possible motives to our students that are "consonant with reality". The hope is that students will rise to the occasion, at least in some cases.

I think there are strengths and weaknesses to the above, but first I'll ask for comments from others. Do you think this is a useful and appropriate approach to teaching in higher education? What barriers are there to this? How might we foster at least some of this in ourselves, our students, and our relationships with them?

Mike,
I haven't read Noddings paper, but will make some general reply to your nice post. I can think of lots of examples where at least some of the four components would enter my own teaching. I like especially fostering care by students-teaching-students small group exercises. I find these a very effective way of breaking down the analysis of a text anyway, and do think that it promotes values of cooperative learning/team-work, and open-mindedness towards the opinions of others. I also think teachers can be flexible and show caring by finding out where their students 'are at' and what they want to get out of a class, rather than just coming in with a syllabus that inflexibly tells them all the course content and topics from the start.

Some of the other components I'm less sure of, and perhaps less sure how to personally exemplify inside or outside of class. I don't know if its just the epistemologist in me, as compared with Noodings ethicist outlook, but I've always though my primary role was to exemplify fair-minded *critical* traits--traits of inquiry perhaps--rather than moral traits. In other words, if I teach for what Richard Paul calls "strong sense critical thinking skills," the skills of the critical person, I am fostering virtues like intellectual independence, humility, courage, integrity, perseverence, empathy,etc. I don't doubt (as Paul indeed insists) that intellectual and moral virtues are intimately connected, so that in so doing, I am also teaching not just skills used in respect to beliefs, but also reflective actions. But I suppose I think that philosophy teachers should primarily teach good critical theory in these ways, and how it relates to ethical judgment, and that his 'rubs off' because of the interconnectedness, with helping to develop students of sound moral character as well. But I'm less sure why Noddings thinks that exemplifying moral traits like caring is the DIRECT or primary task, since I tend to see it as more derivative from a primary task of teaching students how to REASON soundly.