Abstract
Professions typically set ethical guidelines that articulate certain responsibilities and express a set of common values and principles that such professionals should hold. The professional educator aims to create and maintain a learning environment that expresses care for each student’s learning and developmental needs. The ethics of care have been applied to the teaching profession where the teacher plays the role of the one-caring and the student is the cared-for. Attributes of the caring teacher include receptivity and motivation. However, the demands of teaching can result in high levels of stress, which can lead to burnout and attrition. The process of “burning out” often involves depersonalization, whereby the ethic of care erodes and teachers lose the connection between their values to care and their day-to-day experience in the classroom. Recently, mindfulness-based approaches to professional development have been developed to help teachers manage the demands of teaching, reduce stress, and prevent burnout. This chapter explores how one such program, CARE for Teachers, is designed to cultivate teachers’ social and emotional competence so that they can maintain their caring ethics across their career.
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Jennings, P.A., DeMauro, A.A. (2017). Promoting the Ethics of Care in a Mindfulness-Based Program for Teachers. In: Monteiro, L., Compson, J., Musten, F. (eds) Practitioner's Guide to Ethics and Mindfulness-Based Interventions . Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64924-5_9
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