Primary Teachers, Inspection and the Silencing of the Ethic of Care

This book offers a unique and critical explication of teachers' understanding and experience of care during a period of regulatory scrutiny and 'notice to improve'. Written followingresearch in a primary school in the north of England, it draws on the findingsof an institutional ethnography to reveal the institutional mediation ofthe teachers' everyday work. Written from a critical interpretivist standpoint,the focus moves away from care as essentialist practice by foregrounding theteachers' talk, through 'I' poems, to explicate the political mediation ofcare. Care is understood,experienced and operates in a social milieu. It is not fixed and, importantly, isnot understood as a practice or an emotional exchange between one person and another. In this book, Joan Tronto's (1993) argument for a 'political ethic of care' isutilised as a conceptual framework for understanding teachers' experiences. It is an alternative to approaches that individualise a teacher's caringpractices as only belonging in the intimate, proximal domains of care givingand care receiving.