Week 7: Caring

Angela C. Stanley

Week 7 Readings: Restorying “Caring” in Education: Students’ Narratives of Caring for and about, Nice Is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color, and ‘Caution, we have power’: resisting the school-to-sweatshop pipeline through participatory artistic praxes and critical care.

            The article Restorying “Caring” in Education: Students’ Narratives of Caring for and about was a powerful map to describe the different avenues in which people take to express caring and what they find important.  The article looked at caring in two ways: caring for and caring about.

            Caring for was described on an individual level.  It was defined as day-to-day, interpersonal reactions, specifically regarding a person’s needs at a specific time.  For example, a teaching asking about a student’s current mental health state demonstrates that the teacher cares for the student and his/her mental health.  I related this type of caring to the article Nice is Not Enough: Defining Caring for Students of Color.  Not only is “caring for” in the actual title, but the article put an emphasis on how being nice does not equal caring, and in fact just being nice can be detrimental to others. 

By just being nice, you are not allowing the other person to bring forward their cultural self-identity to the space.  In a school setting, this can be dangerous because you aren’t looking at a student as an individual but just as a young grade earner.  This article immediately brought me back to my school experiences I was easily able to identify which teachers made me feel cared for and which ones did not through our interactions.

caring for

Caring about was described on a more general level.  It was defined as an action of an interaction regarding a more general principle, concept, or policy.  For example, caring about can be exhibited as focusing on standardized test scores.  Often, the idea of caring about is associated with a position of power within a social hierarchy but it is not limited to such.  I related this type of caring to the article ‘Caution, we have power’: resisting the school-to-sweatshop pipeline through participatory artistic praxes and critical care.  In this article, it shows the attitudes of immigrant and Latinx communities versus the attitudes of those not included in those groups. 

The article explained the art forms that the individuals used to send a message across from the Latinx community to the rest of society about how they felt they were being viewed and treated like second class citizens.  In a white dominant society, the act of trying to change the mistreatment of people of color could be seen as “rocking the boat,” but in actuality, the intention is just to prompt a sense of care to a culture that is otherwise severely stigmatized against.  By understanding that these individuals came together as a group to make a statement about something that they want to change, it clear that the treatment they receive is a general concept that they care about.

caring about

In conclusion, the ideas of caring for and caring about both demonstrate what an individual considers important, but in different ways.  In fact, even when you google search the two different terms of caring for and caring about, the image results follow these definitions.  Caring for shows results of interpersonal interactions whereas caring about shows very broad and basic icons to demonstrate a sense of caring.