It Takes Heart: The Experiences and Working Conditions of Caring Educators.

Unfortunately, despite the feminist and culturally responsive education literature that demonstrates the impact of care on student success, education workers are asked to do a tremendous amount of work that does not contribute as directly to student and worker well-being as care work (Dunn 37). A recognition that care work is a shared responsibility that is essential to the educational success of students demands that care work be paid work in tandem with defined time for care work. To follow Tokumitsu's logic, understanding the care work of education as labor is a step toward mitigating its potential exploitation by helping workers understand what working conditions will sustain the kind of care work that our students deserve. Because the specifics of care work are not articulated in our contracts or our job descriptions at our school, and because it belongs to a category of work that has traditionally been unwaged or under-waged, it is easy to frame it as "extra" work, that some education workers opt into--rather than "real" work that we all have to do. [Extracted from the article]