Title: Who Cares? On the Role of Caring in Teaching and Learning with Students with SEND
Stream: Education & Difference: Gifted Education, Special Education, Learning Difficulties & Disability
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Authors:
Charlotte Williams-Foster, Notting Hill and Ealing High School, United Kingdom
Abstract:
What does caring mean within the role of an educator of students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)? Considering care, not as physical assistance or support with personal tasks, but as a part of the ways in which teacher and student work with one another in learning. To care for another is to hold them under your protection, but also to connect with them in a meaningful way. This paper explores how a reconsideration of the nature of this connection can open new perspectives on what it means to care and be cared for. Cavell, drawing on Thoreau and Emerson, proposes estrangement and even confrontation as the characterising qualities of human relationships. How is it possible to care across such boundaries, both for learner and teacher? What might such perspectives reveal about our daily work with students, our tailored group interventions, our individualised strategies? This leads to an examination of what kinds of power are inherent in caring; does protection imply control or even inflict inability? We explore the implications of these reassessments of what it means to care for teaching students with SEND, drawing on new work in Deleuzian theory, to propose a caring that embraces the full extravagance of difference and even challenges our sense of self. Perhaps it is only through an examination how we try to know others, by exploring and experiencing the nature of the disconnection between us, that we can truly begin to understand what it means to care.
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