Getting to Know Your Students and an Educational Ethic of Care

Abstract

In the 10 years since Hawk and Lyons published, “Please Don’t Give Up on Me: When Faculty Fail to Care” in Journal of Management Education, much has changed about the nature of pedagogical caring, relational learning, and the instructor–student relationship per se. The landscape of expectations for the type and depth of relationships faculty will have with students has shifted toward a blurring of relational boundaries and roles. Chory and Offstein’s article in the first Journal of Management Education issue of 2017, “‘Your Professor Will Know You as a Person’: Evaluating and Rethinking the Relational Boundaries Between Faculty and Students” draws on Hawk and Lyons and critically examines the advisability of extending an ethic of care to situations outside the classroom setting. In this essay, I engage with Chory and Offstein’s work and the three rejoinders that accompanied it in Journal of Management Education, Volume 41, Issue 1, and share specific ways in which faculty can “get to know their students” that directly benefits student learning.