James Reid 
Primary Teachers, Inspection and the Silencing of the Ethic of Care [PDF ebook] 

This book offers a unique and critical explication of teachers’ understanding and experience of care during a period of regulatory scrutiny and ‘notice to improve’. Written followingresearch in a primary school in the north of England, it draws on the findingsof an institutional ethnography to reveal the institutional mediation ofthe teachers’ everyday work. Written from a critical interpretivist standpoint, the focus moves away from care as essentialist practice by foregrounding theteachers’ talk, through ‘I’ poems, to explicate the political mediation ofcare. Care is understood, experienced and operates in a social milieu. It is not fixed and, importantly, isnot understood as a practice or an emotional exchange between one person and another. In this book, Joan Tronto’s (1993) argument for a ‘political ethic of care’ isutilised as a conceptual framework for understanding teachers’ experiences. It is an alternative to approaches that individualise a teacher’s caringpractices as only belonging in the intimate, proximal domains of care givingand care receiving.