I care, therefore I am

 

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What motivates us to do the things that we do? Why do I regularly spend my precious Saturday mornings with asylum seekers to help them with their German language? Why do I walk silently hand-in-hand with others on a rainy Sunday afternoon dressed in a life jacket in order to raise awareness of the ongoing situation of migrants trying to reach Europe? Why do I organise a trip to India with students rather than tagging along with another teacher who has already set up their own trip and done all of the work? Why would I add an additional doctoral research project to my already full-time teaching responsibilities? Why am I even a teacher? The reason is, simply, that I care. I care enough about certain things to do something about them. In caring, I am behaving as an ethical being; I am doing the thing that I think is right. As Frankfurt (1988) recognises, it is what we ‘care about’ that influences our actions and our behaviours:

Caring, insofar as it consists in guiding oneself along a distinctive course or in a particular manner, presupposes both agency and self-consciousness. It is a matter of being active in a certain way, and the activity is essentially a reflexive one. This is not exactly because the agent, in guiding his own behaviour, necessarily does something to himself. Rather, it is more nearly because he purposefully does something with himself (p.83)

As Frankfurt says, it is not possible to have agency without caring first, and, when caring, we subsequently think and act. Caring is what makes us humans do the things we do and be the people we are. I care, therefore I am. There are of course some things that move me more than others and this is of course the nature of being human and living in my own private, subjective reality with my own experiences that shape me. I am, however, happy to say that I am not one of those indifferent people, sailing along steadily and leading a quiet, predictable life, being satisfied that nothing disrupts my routine. There is nothing worse than indifference in my view; nobody ever changed anything by being indifferent. So, because I care, I take risks. I allow my life to be disrupted. I am embracing the ‘mess’ (Cook, 2009; Dean, 2017) that is my research, and I welcome the challenge of untangling it all. That is how I ended up here, designing, carrying out and writing my doctoral research project in the way that I have chosen.

Being a teacher, so many of the things that I care about can be brought into my classroom, and I can try to model my ethical behaviour to my students, in the hope that they will also find things that they care about and that they might do something about them. So, being who I am, and with the principle of care underpinning my thoughts and actions, my research came about, has taken shape and is presented through my thesis. The research is a demonstration of how practitioner research (methodology) and pedagogy (teaching and learning) are one in the same thing, how teachers can be learners just as students can be researchers, and how it is possible to develop an ethical pedagogy of care through collaborative inquiry. Do I care too much? Probably. Is it love? Right now, yes. Let’s just wait and see how I feel by the end of it all.

References:

Cook, T. (2009) The purpose of mess in action research: Building rigour through a messy turn. Educational Action Research, 17 (2), 277-291

Dean, J. (2017) Doing reflexivity: An introduction. Bristol: Policy Press

Frankfurt, H.G. (1988) The importance of what we care about: Philosophical essays. New York: Cambridge University Press