A Caring Turn

In her lecture "Does Anybody Really Care?: Research and Its Impact on Practice" Wollman-Bonilla pulls off an impressive turn of phrase and in the process calls into question not just the motivations of researchers, but policy-makers and teachers as well.  When I first read the title, I thought Wollman-Bonilla would be talking about whether the research she and others do in her field has any real impact or if ultimately they work in a kind of vacuum, and if so, why do it at all?  And Wollman-Bonilla does take up that question, but she goes further.  In examining whether teachers care about research, Wollman-Bonilla ends up asking whether researchers care about teachers, or for that matter students, and whether the research they do is an appropriate expression and enactment of that care.  I think this line of questioning is important for all of us - why do we want to teach or work in education at all?  Just as Wollman-Bonilla suggests that if the primary motivation of researchers is to get published or esteemed it's just as likely their work will hurt children as help them, I think we as teachers (and teacher-researchers) need to realize that if we are just in this field because we did well in English class and want to feel like the smartest person in the room, we're in the wrong place, and we are as likely to do harm as good.  Like Wollman-Bonilla's research, our work needs to be an expression of caring, and caring especially for students.  We don't think of research as a generally caring thing, but I think Wollman-Bonilla shows that our motivations inform the potential impact of all of our actions, whether or not we traditionally think of them as having a moral valence.  I suppose this is all a long-winded way of saying we have to make sure our hearts are in the right place, in our teaching and our research, but it's something that's worth being reminded of.
With that in mind, I did wonder whether the article by Lytle et al, though clearly an expression of caring research, was a little too teacher-focused.  Yes it is important that we care for teachers and that the voices of teachers are heard, but I was definitely missing a sense of how students experienced 20 years of change in the Philadelphia schools.  How strong a sense of a classroom or a school or a school system can we get if we are only hearing the voices of teachers and researchers and not those of students and parents?