Care by Design: Building Relational Pedagogy into Teaching Practice

During the pandemic, many of us showed remarkable care and flexibility—especially in post-secondary education, where everyone had to quickly adapt to online learning. As post-pandemic demands grow, that collective gentleness is harder to maintain. What if care wasn’t something we added only in crisis but built into teaching and learning from the start?

This workshop explores how faculty, instructors, and staff can embed care into their teaching and learning pedagogy and practices. Drawing on Nel Noddings’ (Caring, 1984; The Challenge to Care in Schools, 1992) ethics of care and relational knowing, we’ll examine care as both an ethical orientation and a pedagogical design challenge. How do we create learning environments where care is possible for both students and instructors?

Through facilitated dialogue and hands-on design activities, participants will:

• Explore what “care” looks like in practice (e.g. assignment design, communication patterns, peer learning structures)
• Identify the challenges and barriers to enacting an ethics of care and relational knowing in teaching and learning
• Prototype design interventions that distribute care more equitably
• Discuss tensions around equity, boundaries, and institutional constraints

We’ll provide frameworks drawn from care ethics and relational pedagogy, but this session is designed as collaborative exploration — we don’t have all the answers, and we’ll learn together. Participants will leave with practical tools and at least one “care-inflected” design change they can implement.