Articles written by

Daniela Mercieca

Volume 10-Issue 1: June 2016

Working with children? Transforming tiredness into Deleuzian exhaustion

Educational contexts are often built on assumptions that are considered common and good by the majority of persons working within these contexts. Policy and specialisation, originally means to operationalising these assumptions, have become ends and reference points in themselves. The encounter with children is becoming less and less the centre of education endeavour. This often brings about the experience of tiredness as endless effort is placed by different educational professionals in trying to contain the different forces at play within particular scenarios. Following Deleuze, we suggest exhaustion, which he distinguishes from tiredness. Exhaustion comes about from having endless possibilities. This however involves the violent encounter of non-sense which shakes sense assumptions. We argue that engaging with children is this violent encounter which is essential for the professional in education.
40 min read
Volume 14-Issue 2: December 2020

What can I do? Caring relationships among teachers, students and families during COVID-19 lockdown in Scotland

Engaging with the ethics of care as developed by Nel Noddings, this paper unpacks the perceptions of three primary teachers working in Scotland during COVID-19 lockdown. Noddings constructs her ethics of care as relational. This focus on the ‘relation’ is central to the paper and the three themes that emerged from analysing the in-depth interviews conducted with the teachers show different facets of the relations teachers were engaged in during the lockdown. The first theme looks at the teachers’ work during COVID-19 lockdown as embedded within a larger Scottish discourse that has care as central to its formation. The second theme discussed the idea of reciprocity – care ethics focuses on acknowledgment of the relation between the carer and the cared for. The third theme focuses on parents as being intermediary between the teachers and students. The paper suggests that the experience of lockdown offered primary school teachers new possibilities of caring, thus giving teachers the possibility to go beyond the ‘norm’ of care established within their classrooms and schools.