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 following
research in a primary school in the north of England, it draws on the findings
of an institutional ethnography to reveal the institutional mediation of
the teachers' everyday work. Written from a critical interpretivist standpoint,
the focus moves away from care as essentialist practice by foregrounding the
teachers' talk, through 'I' poems, to explicate the political mediation of
care.

Care is understood,
experienced and operates in a social milieu. It is not fixed and, importantly, is
not 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' is
utilised as a conceptual framework for understanding teachers' experiences.
It is an alternative to approaches that individualise a teacher's caring
practices as only belonging in the intimate, proximal domains of care giving
and care receiving.