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.