'A Special Duty of Care': Exploring the narration and experience of teacher caring

Abstract

The present article questions our conceptualisation of teacher caring in contemporary Australian society. It draws on media discussions of the school and teachers, and the writer's ethnographic experiences in an urban secondary high school, to explore our expectations of teachers and the ways in which these expectations shape teachers' relations with students. Our discussions about teachers suggest that underlying debates about the responsibilities of teachers are widely shared idealisations of the teacher figure. I suggest that Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and more specifically the development of this concept to talk specifically about an institutional habitus, can inform our understanding of the ways in which these ideals are enacted in a particular educational setting. I explore the ways in which broader social processes of social class and gender interplay and contribute to shaping caring relations between teachers and students through the intermediary structures of a specific high school.