In this qualitative study, the authors examined how care was enacted, understood, and valued by teachers and students in nine ninth-grade English language arts classrooms. Following two yearlong cohorts of teachers, the authors explored sociopolitical interpretations of care, specifically focusing on how care was an everyday, political phenomenon…

Current policy in England, informed by a version of cognitive science, enforces an absolute distinction between experts and novices, or teachers and learners; from this binary, operating in tandem with regimes of performativity instantiated in a curriculum shaped by high-stakes testing, are derived particular forms of pedagogy and particular…