Читать книгу Stories of Caring School Leadership - Mark A. Smylie - Страница 20

A second element of caring consists of positive virtues and mindsets that are brought to the pursuit of the aims of caring. These virtues include compassion, empathy, patience, sympathy, and kindness. They include fairness and justice, authenticity, humility, and vulnerability. They also include prudence, transparency, honesty, trustworthiness, and respect for others and their integrity.

Four positive mindsets are particularly important to caring. The first is attentiveness to others. If caring is to address others’ needs and interests, one must be attentive to understand, deeply and genuinely, who persons are and what their needs, concerns, interests, and situations might be. Another mindset is motivational orientation. If caring truly means acting on behalf of others, one must be motivated accordingly, and this orientation cannot be diminished by attention to one’s own needs and self-interests. Attentiveness and motivational orientation toward others do not lead to permissiveness nor abdication of responsibility. Rather, they become a positive basis for the fulfillment of responsibility. As theologian Eugene Peterson argues with regard to the helping professions generally, “If we do not keep our assignment, we do not care.”¹³

¹³Peterson (1994, p. 71).

A third type of mindset consists of personal and professional identities related to caring. How persons see themselves as caring or uncaring human beings and as capable or incapable of caring will likely affect their efforts to be caring. Likewise, how persons see themselves in a professional role, what they perceive the norms of the profession to require of them, and what they perceive as others’ expectations for them in their role may influence caring. A fourth mindset is playfulness. This mindset reminds us that caring is not a dour enterprise. Although difficult and taxing at times, it can be joyful and fulfilling. Moreover, playfulness is a way of knowing, seeing, and engaging with others that encourages creativity, inventive thinking, and flexibility. Playfulness can reveal the world through others’ eyes—a view that is essential to understanding others, their situations, and ways to be caring of them.