The Heart of Teaching: An Autoethnographic Analysis of a White Teacher's Socialization to Care

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore my developmental journey as a White, female, multicultural educator. I explore how my formative and professional experiences inform, construct, and affect my capacity to provide care in my instruction and interaction with diverse learners. Through autoethnography, I develop an emergent framework entitled the Socialization to Care, which arose from a critical analysis of my formative and professional experiences. The Socialization to Care describes the lifelong process of developing social awareness, critical consciousness, and social advocacy to resist bigotry in one's personal and professional life. This ability to see everyone as equally human should be considered a requisite disposition for teachers because the Socialization to Care promotes the integration of care as a central praxis of teaching diverse learners. Through a series of interrelated autoethnographies, I explore the critical life and professional experiences that developed my ethic of care and how these life experiences evolved to impact my instructional practices as a culturally responsive teacher. Autoethnography incorporates the conception of ethnography to systematically build an understanding of cultural knowledge into a self-explorative process that results in the production of culturally relevant knowledge and empathy. The need for this research is supported by the need for preservice teachers to develop an ethic of care with a focus on empathy for the whole child which inspires students to develop an intrinsic motivation to learn and is at the heart of culturally relevant teaching.