Teacher and Student Narratives on Experiences of Care (and Non-Care) in the Pandemic School; [Narrativas Docentes y Estudiantiles Sobre Experiencias de Cuidado (y No Cuidado) en la Escuela Pandémica]

The results of a qualitative study are reported, from the perspective of the ethics of care, in which the concept of care and care practices are investigated through 49 telematic interviews with teachers and students from different communities in the country. The ethics of care conceives care as a three-dimensional phenomenon, which includes concern, affections, and actions to meet the needs of others. The pandemic context has demanded the transformation from face-to-face to virtual teaching, which has implied a series of new demands for the educational communities. Inspired by the Empirically Grounded Theory method, four central categories were inductively reconstructed from the open analysis of the teachers’ and students’ narratives: context, definition of care, care practices and non-care practices. It is concluded that there is a fragile relationship between the perspectives of the ethics of care and the answers obtained in the interviews, in which everyone should be conceived as caregivers as well as recipients of care in coherence with the postulates of interdependence and the intrinsic relational nature of human being. A distinction is made between teachers as caregivers and students as recipients of care. It is concluded that the pandemic context has evidenced and worsened the differences in resources available for schools according to the commune, associated with the inequity in the distribution of resources in the Chilean educational system. © 2022 by Psykhe