Care as experiential pedagogy: Soil building in social work education

Abstract

In this conceptually-oriented paper, we propose care as experiential pedagogy as a tentative strategy to build a community of care in and beyond the social work classroom. Using a relational methodology that uses letter writing and text messaging to facilitate theory building, this article first thinks through our attempts to enact care as pedagogy in an academic and broader context often hostile to care. We discuss why care as experiential pedagogy is ever more important in the current neoliberal context. We talk about the politics of care and various conditions that make our care-centered pedagogy challenging, and we consider the groundwork and efforts required in order to make care pedagogy ‘work’.  We discuss particular strategies that we have engaged in to co-construct care-full classrooms with our students. We finally close with one possible example of how experiential learning can be deployed in the classroom to cultivate communities of care amongst students; one that is (literally) grounded in the metaphor of hot composting and soil building.