Towards a framework for care-full teacher learning: stories from the British art show professional development programme

The education system in England can arguably be characterised as care-less. Art teachers, for example, are rarely offered opportunities to acquire subject-specific knowledges. This paper reports on a programme which supported art teachers to engage with the critical, find comfort with/in the indeterminate, and take up the questioning approach espoused in contemporary arts philosophies. We draw on interviews with fourteen teachers and a feminist ethic of care to suggest that the programme’s focus on particularity, politics and purpose recognised the realpolitik of teachers’ work. Unlike the logic of cause and effect, teachers were trusted to direct their own learning and, over time, they changed their practices. We suggest that this ethical care framework could be more widely used to support transformational teacher learning.