Care for Education. A Saving Grace

This Special Issue on Education in the Present Age needs a reflection on what nurtures education, holds it together: care. Thinking about education and care is not new, but gained renewed attention in the pandemic, when the lines between students and teachers blurred because of the collective experience we were going through. Since the early 1990’s, Nel Noddings’ work (1984-2013) is key for those wanting to reaffirm the caring dimensions of education. She analyzed care and its place in ethics, and developed a view on the importance of care in schooling and learning. Since then, care ethicists further developed notions of what is good care, turning those to institutional and societal contexts that promote caring communities and societies. Our essay builds on that work. It is an encounter between Robert Stake’s notions of education and responsive approaches to evaluation and Merel Visse’s experiences with the field of care ethics, translated for a general audience of people who are not necessarily ethicists. Our encounter resulted in the book A Paradigm of Care, and in Spain, resulted in a leaflet with fourteen facets of care we shared with the graduate faculty and students. These insights are meant to evoke and stimulate reflection, deliberation and listening: important to care.