Justification of the topic

The ethics of care is a fundamental way of being in the world and is connected with social justice. Caring, as an important human and democratic practice, offers a political programme that could balance ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2000). Education, meanwhile, is a profession related to care, nevertheless in practice several contradictions proliferate about this issue. Despite concerns about the importance of teachers learning to care for their students, most teacher education programs do not apply relational pedagogy and place little emphasis on caring (Quigley, 2016).

Historically, issues related to care have been associated with women and have had little social value, thus from the feminism the slogan “the personal is political” takes an important relevance when crossing the frontier of the everyday to make the problems of women social problems. As such, teacher training requires a personal transformation to reach a transformation of practices. We have responsibility as critical citizens, but also as future trainers on the road to social justice and equity (Martínez & Ramírez, 2017). For this reason, care should be practiced equally by all human beings. The greater involvement of men within caring professions has the potential to transform gender relations and subvert entrenched patriarchal gender regimes (Connell 1995; Williams 1995; Murray 1996; King 1998; Owen 1998; Drudy et al. 2005).

Furthermore, apply care ethics to the educational field would give rise for a need to ensure that spaces and conditions for caring can be developed and fostered, which would then impact on policies and teacher education programs (Nguyen, 2016).

Conceptual Framework

‘Care’, in this instance, is defined as: “A species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto, 1993, p. 103).

All this has direct repercussions on education because only when the educator is responsible for the other, responds to him in his specific situation, cares and takes care of him from the responsibility, is education given. That is why education can´t be understood if it occurs outside of ethics, without a responsible relationship with the other (Ortega & Romero, 2018).

Teachers who practice an ethic of care consider developing relationships artfully complex and at the same time, critical to a learning environment where students feel safe to take the risks that real learning requires (Charney, 2002; Watson, 2003). Under this approach, practitioners base their professionalism instead upon a political ethic of care, which challenges the privatisation and domestication of care and places it at the heart of thinking about society (Taggart, 2011).

Research Objectives

The general objective of this work is to do a systematic review of the literature on the ethics of care in the current childhood educational system and society.

From the general objective mentioned above, other specific objectives are established:

• Identify the possibilities and / or limitations of care ethics when applying it in education.

• Analyze the implications that a pedagogy based on care can have in order to obtain greater social justice.

• Propose possible future lines of research on the ethics of care in the educational field.

Research Questions

• How can the scope of care be extended as an inclusive citizenship issue and caring as a democratic practice?
• What implications would the reconceptualization of care bring to the educational field?

Methodological Design A systematic review was carried out in order to analyze the place of the ethics of care in the current childhood educational system and society. As Onwuegbuzie and Frels (Codina, 2017) explain, the importance of this type of research lies in the fact that with them researchers are offered information on the production that has already been carried out on a research topic. To ensure that the characteristics of the systematic review occur in this review, the guidelines that characterize the SALSA Framework (Search, Appraisal, Synthesis and Analysis) were followed. Procedure The bibliographic review was carried out in the following international databases: Dialnet, ERIC (Education Ressources Information Center) and WOS (Web of Science). The keywords used for the search were “ethics of care” and “education”. These keywords had been combined using the Boolean operators "AND", "NOT" and "OR". Likewise, the filters used had been the following: articles published in the last 10 years and, as languages, Spanish and English. In total, we found 577 articles in WOS, 347 in ERIC and 265 in Dialnet. After filtering by type of document and year of publication, we exclude 895 of 1189 the total founded. To select the articles we use the following inclusion criteria: a) Articles that introduce the ethic of care in the educational field, specially in childhood education; b) Articles related to education and social justice; c) Articles published between 2010 and 2019, and finally d) Articles written in English or Spanish. Data Collection and Analysis For data collection, a descriptive analysis was chosen. With this objective, in a first phase, the information of the articles was collected based on the following categories: authors, year, title, publication, language, country, summary and keywords. In the second phase, an in-depth reading of the articles was carried out and the following categories were defined for the analysis: methodology, participants, care and education ethics, care and social justice, implications, limitations, findings and the keywords mentioned before. Finally, the information included in each category was analyzed. In this analysis, a comparison was established between articles to try to determine common points and discrepancies, and were developed instruments (tables, diagrams, etc.) that could facilitate the understanding of the results by the reader.

Advocacy of inclusive citizenship and caring as a democratic practice provides a promising alternative to the dominant discourses of citizenship in education. A critical citizenship education would aim to develop critical individuals who are committed to engage in caring as a democratic practice and to pursue justice (Winton, 2008). To obtain that purpose, there are different aspects to take into consideration. First, an ethical pedagogical role for teachers is to foster a sense of social responsibility in students and to cultivate a sense of openness to others. Second, relations of love, care, solidarity and responsibility belong within frameworks of equality as well as in debates and policies about the purposes and curriculum of educational institutions. Third, responsibility is a practice, a disposition and is relational (McLeod, 2015). From the results and conclusions of the articles, the following implications are extracted: a) It is necessary to carry out more research on the ethics of care and, more specifically, in the early childhood education stage. b) The care ethics approach is useful for training teachers of the 21st century society because it allows the development of skills necessary to train socially responsible citizens. c) The ethics of care generates pedagogical changes, since students become an active subject in their educational development. In addition, it offers opportunities for socially contextualized and authentic learning. d) Finally, care ethics must be integrated into teacher training programs, as well as in the school curriculum, in order to ensure the proper integration of this pedagogical approach in the teaching-learning processes.

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