Getting to Know Your Students and an Educational Ethic of Care

Caring, Boundaries, and Knowing Your Students “as People”

In their essay, Rebecca Chory and Evan Offstein have opened a conversation that is overdue for critical discussion across a wide set of contexts and stakeholders. Students, faculty, administrators in higher education, political leaders, particularly at the state level, and—yes—parents need to come together to engage in an ongoing conversation about the issues and questions Chory and Offstein raise. These two show great courage in provocatively posing questions about what it means to “care about” and “care for” the students we encounter. Chory and Offstein assemble and discuss the available evidence, and challenge what appear to be currently accepted, and largely unspoken, notions about the increasingly personalized nature of faculty–student relations, primarily outside of the formal classroom and advising processes.

I particularly appreciate their insightful discussions of the impact on faculty–student relations of wider contextual issues such as the increasing litigation from court rulings, the “market” orientation of universities and students as “customers,” “employees,” and “clients,” the significant rise of helicopter parents, and the rise in the use of adjunct faculty and nonfaculty professionals in higher education institutions as cost saving moves. All these trends have had ubiquitous and often undesirable impact on the student experience both inside and outside the formal classroom. Additionally, the erosion of the quality of the K-12 learning that students bring to higher education has had a detrimental impact on the rigor and high standards faculty can reasonably expect from students, with the increasing use of remedial processes to make up for the K-12 deficiencies.

Chory and Offstein have surfaced significant issues and placed them on the table for us to consider. This provocative conversation needs to occur across the academy. I believe that the extra-classroom concerns they raise are an excellent balance to examining an ethic of care as an intra-classroom experience within the context of formal learning in courses (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007), within related advising responsibilities (e.g., Holmes, 2004), and within academic mentoring (e.g., Hinsdale, 2015). In many ways, Chory and Offstein have extended our concern for pedagogical caring and pedagogical respect from the Hawk and Lyons (2008) article to follow trends now salient in the increasingly boundaryless faculty–student relationship experience. So I want to offer a bit more on how we might view an ethic of care and address what seems to be the impression that an ethic of care always results in positive outcomes for those involved in the relationship as well as the relationship itself. The formal setting in the classroom is noticeably more norm and rule scripted than the informal setting outside of the classroom, making the conversation that Chory and Offstein have begun even more crucial.

I also believe it is important to be clear about the significant difference between questions that faculty may ask themselves, as offered by Chory and Offstein in the pursuit of an ethic of care, and the assumptions, surfaced and not surfaced, that underlie the questions themselves. Thus, I offer a conversation about how I understand this aspect of their essay, and share brief comments on the issue of student evaluations of faculty as they relate to faculty–student relations.

An Ethic of Care

Chory and Offstein introduce an ethic of care through the citation of Hawk and Lyons (2008) in which we focused exclusively on the formal or “academic” aspects of embracing an ethic of care. I invite the reader to engage with our 2008 article and the extensive ethic of care literature (see, e.g., Engster, 2007; Hawk, 2011; Held, 2006; Noddings, 1984; Slote, 2007; Tronto, 1993; see also Noddings, 1988, 1992, 2002, 2006, for more from the education perspective). In the service of summarizing for conversation’s sake, an ethic of care (Noddings, 1984) is a relational ethic that focuses on the following:

The distinction between “caring for” and “caring about” is important to make here, where “caring for” necessarily involves some specific, concrete action by the one caring intended for the developmental well-being of the relationship and the parties to the relationship. “Caring about” does not necessarily involve that concrete action. Furthermore, the full range of human capabilities—physiological (e.g., Schwartz & Begley, 2002; Zull, 2002), emotional (e.g., Damasio, 1994; LeDoux, 1996), intuitive (e.g., Burke & Sadler-Smith, 2006; Hogarth, 2001), empathetic (e.g., Hoffman, 2000; Slote, 2007), and imaginative (e.g., Johnson, 1993; Kekes, 2006; Werhane, 1999)—are integral to the entire process of engaging in an ethic of care. Said another way, an ethic of care is an embodied ethic (McCarthy, 2010) that involves all our senses and capabilities.

An ethic of care assumes that all situations have an ethical component and that no two situations requiring ethical judgment are identical or nearly identical so as to be regarded as identical. Therefore, faculty who care for the well-being of their students must exercise reason and judgment (Nelson, 2013; Toulmin, 1950/1986) in assessing the unique characteristics of the students, the context, and the situation. There is a reciprocity of mutual well-being in that the relationship works to the constructive development and well-being (Atkinson, 2013; Engster, 2007; Sointu, 2005; White, 2015) of all parties to the relationship. Keep in mind, however, that “wellbeing” is an “essentially contested concept” (Collier, Hidalgo, & Maciuceanu, 2006; Evnine, 2014; Garver, 1990; Gallie, 1956, 1968; Kekes, 1977; MacIntyre, 1973), with the relational perspective of well-being the appropriate ontological base for the relationality of an ethic of care.

An ethic of care also assumes a significantly well-developed capacity to understand boundaries, individual needs, and deeply personal aspects of self. Chory and Offstein’s use of an ethic of care begs the question of an almost clinical capacity to reciprocally nurture, without concurrent clinical training. An ethic of care makes key demands on those in the relationship. The capabilities to support those demands include such competencies as listening, articulating and framing, observation, questioning and inquiry (Nelson, 2013), empathy, imagination, creativity, responsiveness, responsibility, self-reflection and mindfulness, and humility. These abilities vary greatly among individual faculty. Given the trends identified by Chory and Offstein above, there is a fundamental mismatch between the responsibilities of increasingly contingent faculty and increasingly demanding “caring for” capacities. Perhaps most important, an ethic of care encompasses the full range of moral issues experienced by humans across the private/public continuum. Morality is just as fundamental to the public and public policy domain as it is to the private aspects of our lives (see Engster, 2007; Hankivsky, 2004; Robinson, 1999; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; see also Eisler, 2007, for additional perspectives on creating caring public policy initiatives). So the question is whether or not faculty who embody an effective ethic of care within the formal classroom setting can also successfully transfer it to the informal, out-of-class context and whether or not it is justified or even workable.

Citing our empirical research on an ethic of care at the MBA course level (Hawk & Lyons, 2008), Chory and Offstein (2017) wrote,

Similarly, in these very pages [of JME], scholars have implored us to employ an “ethic of care” with our students—to care pedagogically about them and not to “give up” on them and their learning, irrespective of their academic performance. It is a more expansive conceptualization of the student-faculty relationship that requires faculty to emotionally engage with students beyond academics. (p. 10)

Further on in their essay, they wrote, “In the essay that follows, we focus primarily on the non-academic student-professor interactions” (p. 13).

I think it would be helpful to readers if Chory and Offstein specified how we might better understand implications for relationships with our students among the domains that encompass the “academic” and “non-academic” arenas in which a pedagogical ethic of care is a faculty obligation and can successfully emerge. These include the core domains of the teaching and learning processes and assessments in the formal classroom context and the secondary domains of advising (e.g., Holmes, 2004) and mentoring (e.g., Hinsdale, 2015), and even the context of faculty advising student academic organizations. Greater specificity for understanding these implications also extend to Chory and Offstein’s examples and discussions that illustrate critically important issues with which faculty must realistically and practically grapple. I do not wish to convey that there are clear boundaries between the “academic domain” and the “non-academic domain.” Nor do I wish to claim that all instances of an ethic of care are successful; fallibility and narrowness of perspective are integral to cognition in humans, including faculty and administrators of higher education. But I believe the teaching and learning domain, the advising domain, and the academic mentoring domain define the “academic zone” where an ethic of care and a caring student-faculty relationship can successfully and effectively occur. As such, greater delineation of the distinctions claimed by Chory and Offstein would be helpful.

Questions and Assumptions in Our Caring Domains

At the beginning of their essay, Chory and Offstein (2017) identified seven assumptions that are potentially relevant to both the “academic” and the “non-academic” scope of faculty–student relations in the context of an ethic of care. Those assumptions are the following:

To one degree or another, these assumptions appear, explicitly or implicitly, in the discussions that follow in the “Unexamined Assumptions” section of the essay. In that section (pp. 16-28), Chory and Offstein offer five subsections, each of which has two or more questions that provide the focus for their discussions.

The discussion in each of these five subsections is relevant to their declared focus on “non-academic” faculty–student relationships as well as the scope of those relationships. As I read their article, I believe it is worth engaging with Chory and Offstein’s discussion to identify clearly the assumption or assumptions that underlie the faculty–student relationships they feature through the questions they pose as subsections and the discussions they offer. While they identified explicit assumptions in two subsections, it would move the conversation forward if they had done so for the other subsections as well. In my read of their essay, explicit assumptions they surfaced lie in

Assumptions have a fundamental place in the domain of higher education and beyond. They underlie every theory and model we teach in our business and management programs. Our assumptions about students and teaching and learning profoundly influence how we design and teach our courses and programs and the theories and models we offer. And our assumptions about the nature of reality, ontological and metaphysical assumptions, underlie our choices of epistemological and ethical frameworks. Unfortunately, however, across the academic world, I see scant evidence that faculty pay attention to the personal metaphysical and ontological assumptions they hold, that is, their assumptions about the nature of reality. Consequently, they are unfamiliar with the subsequent and related epistemological and ethical assumptions that they bring to the design of their courses and programs. That unfamiliarity has a significant impact on their responsibilities for helping students learn as well as their relationships with them in and outside of the classroom. So, at least conceptually, Chory and Offstein’s (2017) intended focus on assumptions has high potential for relevance and offers a path for engagement about relational learning per se (Gergen, 2009; Thayer-Bacon, 2003).

I applaud the stated effort by Chory and Offstein to surface and examine critical assumptions. I wonder, too, how explicitly examining their own assumptions has altered both the “academic” and the “non-academic” relationships they have with students—what might be different now, when they relate to students, than it was prior to writing the article.

A Further Note on Student Evaluations

I would like to close this portion of the discussion with a few brief comments about student evaluations of faculty (SEF) as it is an issue that Chory and Offstein (2017) raise in their essay and do so with what I believe is a healthy perspective. Chory and Offstein make the point that there is a difference between a SEF that addresses issues of student satisfaction and one that focuses primarily on student learning, or at least an equal emphasis on both. My examination of and exposure to a limited number of college and university SEF, where there is one, suggests that they primarily address the satisfaction issues through multiple questions but only tangentially, if at all, address the issues of the quality of and improvement in student learning. I wonder what the impact would be on faculty–student relationships if SEF were to focus on student learning. And I wonder what the impact would be if doctoral programs were to give relatively equal weight to the competencies of their doctoral students in pedagogical knowledge and skills as they give to the scholarly research competencies. It would be intriguing to see how both the formal and informal student relationships in the “academic” context might change and might better embrace a constructive ethic of care.

The Context of Caring

As faculty members, we have responsibilities for designing and teaching one or more courses and placing the content of those courses in the developmental context and sequence of the programs of which they are a part. Equally important is helping our students learn the course content and assessing their progress as well as helping our students to learn how to learn better. At the same time, we also have to view ourselves as continually emerging learners and helping ourselves improve at helping our students to learn (Rodriguez, 2012). All these are temporally and relationally defined processes that generate continual emergent change in each of us, our students, and our relationships. These are themes that echo strongly in the writings of those who view teaching and learning as processual and relational (Allan, 2012; Benson & Griffith, 1996; Brumbaugh, 1982; Dunkel, 1965; Evans, 1998; Oliver & Gersham, 1989; Riffert, 2005; Whitehead, 1929).

At the same time, we face differing educational contexts and find ourselves at differing places in our careers. Some faculty teach only undergraduate courses, some only graduate courses, and some a mixture of both. Some have small classes (less than 30), some have medium-sized classes (more than 30 but less than 60), some face large classes, and some face a mixture of two or more sizes. Some teach face-to-face, some teach online, and others do both. Some teach at private institutions and some at state assisted institutions. Some are tenure track, some are tenured, and some are contractual, full-time or part-time. Some are passionate about their teaching and others have priorities elsewhere; research and consulting come first to mind. The important point here is not to homogenize the contextual factors for faculty.

Yet, all faculty should have at least some, if not a significant amount of, concern for helping their students to learn. That may seem obvious, but it is worth repeating. That concern should be manifested in activities such as a balanced professional development program for both the content of their courses and the pedagogical knowledge and processes that go with helping students learn the course content and to learn better. As such, I encourage readers to return to the rejoinders that accompanied Chory and Offstein’s essay, as I believe they have much to say about professional context and how it matters for faculty–student relationships as a whole.

John Stark has done a masterful job of capturing the administrator’s perspective and getting at several core issues. I particularly appreciate his emphasis on teaching, learning, and education as processes and the early and ongoing professional development of faculty as processes for learning how to engage more successfully and effectively with their disciplines and with the students in their own learning processes. This certainly suggests that doctoral programs need to overhaul their curricula to emphasize more heavily the ethical and the pedagogical as they relate to research, such as the scholarship of teaching and learning, and a familiarity with the pedagogical literature. I would also include a more in-depth and critical examination of one’s ontological, epistemological, and ethical assumptions. Stark’s perspective suggests that administrators at the program, department, school, and institutional levels have an obligation to put into place caring policies that not only demonstrate and enhance an ethic of care, but that also encourage and reward faculty efforts to model an ethic of care. As John says, it is better to have too much “getting to know” and “caring for” than too little.

Deborah Butler also takes a process view of the issues. She echoes my thoughts on the contextuality of our teaching responsibilities and offers some very useful insights for those teaching large class sections in which I have no experience. (See Bain, 2004, for examples of highly effective teachers across a wide spectrum of disciplines and class sizes.) I especially appreciate her emphasis on the students “getting to know themselves” and developing as learners as an emerging process and the faculty obligation to help them in that process. Butler’s emphasis on teaching as a calling and a profession is perhaps her most important contribution to the conversation. It is apparent that, like me, she has found her passion and calling in the teaching world. But I wonder just how much conversation there has been in our “profession” about what it means to be in a profession and to be a professional. We could take some insight from Mary Parker Follett (Metcalf & Urwick, 1940) and Rakesh Khurana (2007). Parker Follett lays out a highly neglected but rich discussion on the qualities that comprise a profession and a professional, while Khurana critiques the management world and business schools for not developing the criteria to justify being a profession.

I believe Bill Starbuck’s main contribution to the Chory and Offstein conversation is his reminder that the larger context continues to change, and at a more rapid pace. From a technological perspective, the emergence of on-line and at-a-distance learning may render moot the kind of “getting to know your students” relationship that Chory and Offstein question. And Bill’s statistic that only 30% of faculty positions are held by those tenured or on a tenure track may make it more difficult for those who are on the contractually opposite side of the 30% to have the time to engage in the relationships that are the focus of Chory and Offstein (or Hawk & Lyons). Thus, throughout all the rejoinders, the discussion of how context matters and how it is continually changing are as important as all the assumptions and questions Chory and Offstein raised, giving us the opportunity to consider learning in a less monolithic way.

Knowing Your Students: What, How, When, and Why

Knowing more about your students is more aligned with the pedagogical side of the professional development efforts I mentioned above. But what might that mean in practice? What are some effective and usable ways in which to know more about your students?

I taught for 37 years in a College of Business at the same state assisted state university where Chory and Offstein currently teach. Offstein’s teaching responsibilities are primarily at the undergraduate level serving full-time residential undergraduate students during the day; Chory’s are graduate and undergraduate, with a mix of face-to-face and on-line. In contrast, I taught exclusively in the three location, three semester (fall, spring, summer), evening MBA program of 16 required 3 credit courses. We offered all 16 courses every semester in each of the three locations. The program was highly integrated and sequentially developmental, pedagogically focused on the case method and experiential learning processes. Almost all the students were working full-time and attending the program on a part-time basis. The average age of the students entering the program was 33, with most of the students having undergraduate degrees in something other than business and management (we designed the program explicitly for those without an undergraduate major in business or management). Women were 40% of the enrolled students. The average class size was around 15, with the largest being 30. Classes met once a week, for 2½ hours per session.

I taught the integrative capstone strategy course throughout all of my 37 years. In that course I used the case method exclusively, supplemented by occasional very short lecturettes to cover some topic where the students were weak in their understanding. I also taught the financial accounting course, the strategic cost analysis course, and financial management course for the first 10 years of my career, again using the case method as the core pedagogical process. And in the last 10 years of my teaching career, I supervised the integrative capstone field consulting course at the end of the program.

For the first 14 years of my teaching career, I used the standard “different case each week” approach. But in my 14th year of teaching, I had a pedagogical epiphany that led me to throw out the “different case each week” approach and go, first to just two cases for the semester for 10 years, and then just one case for the entire semester for the last 13 years. Those cases were multi-issue and cross-functional cases. I went from what I describe as a “surface” approach to learning to a “deep” approach to learning. That pedagogical emphasis on “deep learning” became the center of my professional development and remained the primary focus of my professional development for the rest of my time at the university. And it became a passion for me. I loved being in the classroom with my students, trying out new approaches to teaching and learning, sharing the evolution of our case analysis, and building a respectful community for my students to risk their ideas and flourish.

The most important way I used to get to know my students was with a questionnaire on the first night of class (Table 1). I shared my own profile to those questions with the students. I then had some knowledge about the differing professional and personal responsibilities of each of my students. And the professional information allowed me to frequently call on a student who had specific experience in a functional area and draw that student into the case discussion.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Student Information Questionnaire.

Name

Employer

Position Title

Brief Description of Responsibilities

Email Address

Office Phone

Home Phone

Undergraduate Institution

Undergraduate Major and Year

Date of Birth

Marital Status

Number of Children and Ages

What Are your Free Time Activities

I also went beyond the questionnaire. Before and after a class session and during the mid-session break, I would frequently engage specific students in conversation that allowed me to learn more about them. And when students came to my office or called me on the phone with questions, I could also use this opportunity to learn more about them. I routinely examined their program applications and their grade transcripts to see how they had done in other courses in the program.

Another process I used to know my students better was learning their names by the second week of the course. I gave each student a tri-folded name card to put on the desk so that I and the rest of the students could learn the names of all of the students. When there was no permanent tiered, horseshoe seating arrangement of the classroom, I set up the class of movable desks in a discussion horseshoe so that students could see the name cards of the other students and face them directly.

In the last 18 years of my teaching, I gave each student a paragraph of weekly developmental feedback and a grade on his or her contributions to the discussion. Occasionally, I could see that a student was struggling or remained largely on the side of our case discussions. I would discreetly ask that student to remain after class for a few minutes and, when all the other students were gone, would respectfully and carefully share my observations about their engagement in the discussions with them and ask if they were satisfied with their progress and understanding up to that point in the semester. If they were not, I would ask them how I could help and it went on from there.

As the case analysis in the capstone strategy course progressed throughout the semester, I required two developmental written analyses and one final written analysis in my capstone strategy course over the course of the semester. The two developmental written analyses, at the halfway and three-quarters points in the semester, were not graded. But I gave each student extensive developmental feedback on all aspects of the papers, including the quality and clarity of the writing. The written analyses gave me a wonderful readout on where my students were relative to where they should be at the time of the developmental written analysis. For a few students, the developmental written analysis clearly indicated they were having difficulties. So again, I asked the student—in my written feedback—to stay after the class session to talk with me. This was another opportunity to learn about a particular student.

Once in a while, a student would voluntarily stay after class, or contact me by phone or letter, as was the case for the letter that triggered Hawk and Lyons (2008), and confide in me that he or she was having difficulty with the analysis or was terrified to engage in the discussion and look incompetent. Again, I would ask the student if he or she had seen me embarrass any student in any of our discussions or if all of the students who actively engaged in the discussions came across as perfectly prepared and with perfect knowledge. And then I told the student that I was also fallible and that sometimes I had off days and that my mind was not as focused as it should be.

I had a number of conversations with students over the years that revealed they were going through a divorce, they had a major illness or medical trauma in the immediate family, they had lost their job, or they had received a promotion that had added significantly to their workload. I also had one student who voluntarily stayed after class and confided in me that she had just lost a sister to suicide and had considered suicide herself. All of these allowed me to understand more fully what was going on for that student at the time and to accommodate, as best as I could, their unique situation. I saw that my primary caring responsibilities were to listen and to make sure that my student recognized that I understood, most appropriately through gentle questions and asking for elaboration. I also knew a few people who had much more experience with those personal traumas than I did; I could approach them with my own questions about how to approach the particular situation. Alternatively, I could refer the student to the counseling center at the institution. Occasionally, my own familiarity with the literature about the issue gave me an opportunity to recommend a book to the student.

The ways I developed were not the only ways in which you can “get to know your students.” One faculty member who had almost no ability to remember student names took photographs of his students and had a seating chart with the photos and names underneath so that he could call on them by name and record the times they engaged verbally in the discussions. Another faculty member used the first class session for students to pair up, learn about their discussion partner, and then introduce that partner to the rest of the class. Another faculty member always had a 5-minute share time at the beginning of the class session. Still another faculty member scheduled office hours with each of her students to learn more about them.

The point of this discussion—about getting to know your students—is that there are a lot of ways you can use to get to know about your students that are directly helpful in helping them learn both the course content and about how to learn without crossing into the vague and questionable social realm that Chory and Offstein discuss in their article. We are limited only in our creativity at finding different ways to know about our students. An ethic of care asks for a complete engrossment in your relationships with your students as they are happening, in the moment, and a commitment to the well-being of the students, the faculty, and the relationships with the students. That requires action on the part of the faculty and action is built on both commitment and the use of reason in the process.

I applaud Chory and Offstein for raising the issues that they discuss. An ethic of care, despite its near total neglect within the business ethics domain, is a major ethical framework, perhaps even a fundamental way of being in the world, that addresses and embraces a much wider and deeper set of ethical issues than is offered by the frameworks of virtue, deontological, utilitarian, and justice ethics. It seems to me that our world would have a higher quality of well-being organizationally and privately if we embraced such an ethic of care.