Pedagogy of Care
Understanding computing teachers' lived experiences through care, responsibility, and relational teaching
Teaching as Care
Teaching is frequently characterised by curriculum plans, assessment frameworks, or instructional strategies. However, these descriptions seldom reflect the lived realities of classroom practice.
This study adopts an alternative approach by focusing on teachers' lived experiences with physical computing.
Analysis of the crafted stories indicates that teaching is not solely a technical activity but also a relational practice. Teachers engage concurrently with students, technologies, colleagues, and institutional expectations. Classroom life develops through continuous acts of attention, judgement, and response.
Physical computing renders these dynamics especially apparent. Devices may fail, circuits can malfunction, and students often encounter unexpected results. Institutional processes, such as observations, learning walks, and assessment pressures, further influence the progression of lessons.
In these contexts, teachers consistently intervene by supporting struggling students, troubleshooting hardware, reframing concepts, or encouraging persistence when projects become challenging.
Hermeneutic interpretation of forty-two crafted stories from teacher interviews demonstrates that these moments are central, rather than incidental, to teaching. They exemplify a pedagogy grounded not only in technical knowledge but also in care, as expressed through responsiveness, responsibility, and professional judgement.
Viewed from this perspective, physical computing pedagogy emerges as a practice enacted through relationships, material interactions, and the daily judgements teachers exercise while supporting students in understanding the world through computation.
This analysis applies Martin Heidegger's framework of two forms of care in human relationships, namely leaping-in and leaping-ahead, to interpret these experiences.
Leaping-in denotes direct intervention in a situation to resolve an immediate difficulty. In the crafted narratives, such moments frequently occur during the practical aspects of teaching physical computing, such as troubleshooting malfunctioning devices, assisting students with debugging code, or restoring lesson continuity when technology fails.
However, leaping-in encompasses more than technical classroom tasks. Teachers described instances including colleagues sharing assessments, Heads of Department reallocating resources, IT staff implementing network restrictions to protect systems, and senior leaders conducting learning walks to evaluate classroom practice. Despite their varied forms, each action represents an intervention within an evolving situation.
These instances exemplify Heidegger's concept of Sorge, or care: actions that address disruption or uncertainty while affirming the significance of ongoing work. At the same time, they highlight the ambivalent nature of accountability in educational settings. Procedures such as work scrutiny or learning walks may induce anxiety, yet they also increase the visibility and perceived importance of physical computing within the curriculum.
In addition to these immediate responses, teachers described forms of leaping-ahead: practices oriented toward future conditions of learning. Teachers anticipated challenges by carefully structuring projects, preparing hardware kits in advance, and designing lesson sequences that gradually increase in complexity.
For example, one teacher staged a robotics project so that students first gained confidence controlling motors before introducing sensors and later integrating both systems. Another teacher kept spare hardware kits at the back of the room, allowing groups to quickly swap equipment when devices failed. These anticipatory practices sustained lesson momentum and enabled students to undertake more ambitious work.
Throughout the crafted stories, teachers continually shifted between these two forms of care: responding to immediate challenges and anticipating the conditions that support learning development over time.
Care thus emerges as a pedagogical practice shaped by technical systems, professional relationships, and institutional structures.
Leaping-in and Leaping-ahead
Care-Driven Computing Pedagogy
Together, these forms of care indicate a broader pattern in teachers' experiences. Analysis of the crafted stories using the hermeneutic circle identified four interrelated dimensions of care in computing education: leaping-in, leaping-ahead, mentoring, and professional identity.