Why should an ethics of care matter in education?
Abstract
When a black 2nd-year student educator gets chased away from a school whilst doing his
teaching practice for hair ‘not setting an appropriate example to learners’, the incident elicits
questions about the rights of student educators during teaching practice, as well as the
extent to which universities and schools care for, support and prepare student educators for
the realities of schooling in South Africa. I situate the article in Transformation in Higher
Education and the discourses of moral education concerning universities’ preparation of
student educators in conjunction with schools in South Africa. The purpose in this article is
to critically evaluate the neoliberal regulatory environment that frames education in general
and how this has led to ‘uncaring’ environments in which student educators must operate
during the execution of their teaching practice. I applied an ethics-of-care- approach to
conceptually discuss the central role that care should play in the professional development
of student educators. A decline in the level of care for student educators during teaching
practice by universities and schools has an increasingly negative impact on their professional
preparation which might lead to increased teacher attrition and discourage new entrants to
the profession. To achieve the kind of care among teachers we envisage through education,
universities and schools will have to re-examine the role of care for student educators during
teaching practice.