Last week we talked about teacher empowerment and what teachers needs are, and how they can begin to develop their inclusive practice through collaborative methods. Either all the way through, we acknowledge that teachers need support in order to be able to do this. In this week, we will look at the support in more detail. No matter how dedicated and well meaning a teacher is and indeed many of them are, they cannot do this work alone. They need to be part of and contribute to; inclusive environments and their own needs must also be attended to. I think it's useful here to draw upon an ethics of care, which is a way of thinking and doing things that has been developed by feminist philosophers. Joan Tronto, foremost among these scholar says, ''An ethic of care is an approach to personal, social, moral, and political life that starts from the reality that all human beings need and receive care and give care to others. The care relationships among humans are part of what mark us as human beings. We are always interdependent beings". This ethic is now being applied in education. Most notably by Nel Noddings who looks at how an ethics of care can contribute to teaching curriculum and even to the overall goal of education. For our purposes, I want to highlight a few points here. Firstly, an ethics of care focuses on how we give and receive care. It is about relationships. Everyone brings something to the relationship as well as having certain needs. In other words, a relationship is reciprocal and not one sided. If you think about the relationship between a teacher and an expert or education official, they both depend on each other to get their work done properly. They are interdependent in meeting the educational goals. For example, in the implementation of a new assessment policy, the teacher might need clarity on how it works from the official and the official needs to ensure that the policy is evenly applied so that there is fairness across the whole educational authority. Secondly, Nel Noddings makes the distinction between caring for and carrying about, and suggests that it is important to bring both of these to the act of caring. Thus, supporting teachers would mean both caring for the needs of teachers, hopefully in a way that is empowering to them, as well as carrying about what it is that they are doing and valuing this as a quest for justice. In our case, inclusive education is a means to equity in education for children with disabilities. If we care about children with disabilities as an issue of justice, then we need to ensure that caring actually occurs. The third point I wanted to make is that we all need care. Carers also need to be cared for, and I'd like to just elaborate on this point in the context of teacher support. Most often, we are comfortable understanding that children need care and we expect teachers to provide a caring environment. But then who is caring for the teachers? To go back to Joan Tronto again, she describes four stages of caring that can be very helpful in planning teacher support or any other form of support or care. The first step is attentiveness, which means that we need to know and understand the teacher's perspective. We need to listen to them and hear what their concerns are and how they would like to be helped or cared for. This is what we discussed in the previous week. The next stage, stage two, is taking responsibility. If we know now what these, are the needs of teachers, then who does what? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that teachers have their needs met? In this week's videos, we will discuss district based and school based teams as some structures that can take some of this responsibility. After this, we need to ensure that the carers or supporters of the teachers, in our case this math as I've mentioned be the district based and school based teams, have the necessary competence to address these needs. Do they know how to offer support to teachers and where to go to get additional support if they do not have the skills? Then the last stage, and this is a very important one, is for those who are receiving the care or support to respond to that care. This means that teachers need to give feedback and to say what is working for them and what needs to change. This requires teacher supporters to be attentive to teacher's needs once again, and to apply the stages of caring that we have discussed again in a cyclical way, adapting them according to the teacher's response. So, practically speaking for support to teachers to work, we need to start by listening very carefully to their needs, designating responsible groups of people to meet these needs, building competence in teacher supporters, and listening to teachers responding to the support offered, and being able to adapt accordingly. I think it is evident that this approach is an empowering one that has the potential to support building professional learning communities.
