My professional experiences over the last decade employed as a Registered Respiratory Therapist in a large urban teaching hospital have provided the context for this paper. Working as a clinical educator and frontline therapist allowed me to develop a caring approach to pedagogy that centers around relationship building throughout all of my educator and leadership practice. The pedagogy of a caring approach has not been traditionally utilized in healthcare education, and often does not get the respect it deserves. While my caring approach to pedagogy has often been criticized by my healthcare colleagues, I have found it to be validated by the literature, especially the work by Noddings, as an effective educational leadership philosophy during the completion of my Master of Education. This paper demonstrates the need for healthcare educators to adopt more components of Noddings’ method into their own practice by describing the qualities, risks, and benefits of a caring approach towards education. I argue that implementing an ethic of care, with particular focus on building caring student-educator relationships, will improve healthcare education through increasing student psychological safety, inclusion, and overall experiences in the clinical learning environment. The implication of this pedagogical shift is bringing connection to adult learning in healthcare education at the post-secondary level, which will in turn shape the attitudes students bring into their future professional practice. A new caring pedagogy could be a cornerstone component to recent overall cultural changes within the Canadian healthcare system.
