Relational care at work: educators’ practices and discourses of care across social inequalities

This study examines how educators perceive and enact care responsibilities across different socioeconomic status (SES) student populations in Israeli schools. Through interviews with 69 educators from primary through high schools, the research analyzes care practices using Noddings’s relational care framework and critical care theories. The findings reveal a common foundation of relational care practices, but with SES-specific variations. In low-SES communities, educators focus on ‘close care’ addressing basic needs, while in high-SES settings, care work often involves mediating parent-student relationships. Educators’ relational care work is informed by therapeutic and ‘good-character’ discourses, with the latter showing SES-dependent manifestations in secondary schools. Educators of disadvantaged students emphasize ‘being a human being’, focusing on empathy and social solidarity, while those teaching higher-SES students stress values like high aspirations and resilience. We argue that educators’ relational care work can reproduce social inequalities through differential emphasis on individual character traits and socio-emotional skills.