Nurturing Student Development in Academic Libraries: A Practice in the Ethics of Care 

In Brief 

This paper explores an ethics of care framework in academic libraries, specifically with the implementation of a professional development initiative for student employees. Using the Architecture Library at Texas Tech University as a case study, we examine how formal professional development opportunities align with care ethics principles by responding to students’ individual needs, fostering nurturing relationships, and contributing to the academic learning environment. Through an exploration of Noddings’ relational theory of care and Tronto’s phases and elements of care, the aim of this paper is to highlight the ability of higher education to engage in a practice of care towards student workers.  

By Lindsey Jackson 

Introduction

Academic libraries often embody a culture of care, whether through deliberate action or instinctive response. Librarians and library staff routinely provide support and assistance, often without explicitly labeling their actions as “care ethics” – they simply see a need and respond. This caring approach is fundamental to educational settings, where the goal is to empower learners and facilitate their growth. 

Student workers in these environments occupy a unique position, straddling the roles of both learner and employee, and as we will later explain, both cared-for and ones-caring. Through their work in the library, they develop essential workplace skills and learn to navigate professional relationships. The supervisor (for the purposes of this paper, a person who may be a librarian or library staff) is responsible not only for overseeing the daily tasks, but also for supporting workers as they learn to navigate a workplace environment, often for the first time.  

This paper will first provide some context of the ethics of care, then focus on the relational (one-caring/cared for) approach of Nel Noddings and finally examine the expanded ethics of care of Joan Trontom which moves into realms of organizational care. Second, we will provide a literature review of current practices of care in academic libraries and higher education. Then, we will discuss the actors in academic libraries broadly and finally share a practice of care enacted at the Texas Tech Architecture Library.  

Ethics of Care Theories: An Overview 

The ethics of care as a philosophical theory largely began with psychology researcher Carol Gilligan. Participating in a study on moral development with her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, graduate student Gilligan pointed out that the research findings were largely biased against girls. The study operated under the theory that moral development moves from universal to principled thinking, and under that assumption, girls were “behind” boys in their moral thinking. Gilligan argued that girls are not morally stunted, they have a different perspective, and an inter-relational way of approaching conflict. The question being asked of children (“Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?”) could be interpreted as “Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?” (with boys largely saying Heinz “yes, he should”) and “Should Heinz steal medicine for his wife?” (with girls largely saying “no, he needs to find another way to get the medicine- what if he’s arrested?”). Gilligan argued that both considerations were engaging in moral development, one with a perspective of justice and another with a perspective of care. Gilligan says that without the voices of girls in the study, the consideration of care was largely unheard (1982, 2011). 

This intellectual disagreement with Kohlberg led to the publication of In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development in 1982. Gilligan’s study on moral development has been criticized for seemingly contributing to stereotypes about gender, with critics arguing that it posits a strict demarcation between the behaviors of men and of women and ignored the gendered socialization of boys and girls (Peirson-Hagger, 2023). As Gilligan has continued to write on the moral development and experiences of girls and women, her theory has been refined but still highlights the societal issue of gendering care as feminine, instead of as a human action. In her 2011 book Joining the Resistance, Gilligan clarifies: 

Listening to women thus led me to make a distinction I have come to see as pivotal to understanding care ethics. Within a patriarchal frame, care is a feminine ethic. Within a democratic framework, care is a human ethic. (p. 22)  

Gilligan argues that she is not making these statements about how all men act and how all women act. The issue is that in a patriarchal society care is gendered as feminine, while justice is seen as “aligned with reason, mind, and self—the attributes of ‘rational man’” (p. 23-24). An ethic of care, for Gilligan, is democratizing—it requires interdependence and a responsibility to others.  

Writing soon after Gilligan, Noddings builds on the ethics of care and applies it to an educational framework. Her early framework drew heavily on women’s traditional caregiving roles, which she described as examples of “natural” caring. She often illustrated her concepts using mother-child relationships, drawing criticism for this potentially limiting and essentialist perspective that seemed to require self-sacrifice for the child’s benefit. Her theories are largely framed as a relationship, and she later called her version of ethics of care “relational ethics” instead of “feminist ethics” (Noddings, 2013). 

Like Gilligan, Noddings has refined her theory and reflected back on her works. In the 2013 edition of Caring, she clarifies her ethics of care as being chiefly concerned with “how, in general, we should meet and treat one another—with how to establish, maintain, and enhance caring relations” (p. x) after commenting that “hardly anyone has reacted positively to the word feminine” (p. xiii).  
 
Noddings suggests in her 1984 work Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education that teachers demonstrate caring tendencies that drive them to address students’ specific needs. While discussing teacher-student dynamics, she employs the terms “one-caring” and “cared-for” to characterize their interactions. In this relationship, the “one-caring” (teacher) becomes invested, or engrossed, in the development of the “cared-for” (student). Using Noddings’ concepts to apply to the library workplace environment, we can frame student workers as recipients of care (the cared-for) and supervisors as providers of care (the one-caring) much like Noddings attributes those roles to students and teachers. This perspective establishes the relational framework necessary for implementing a care-based practice. 
 
On the tasks of the teacher/one-caring, Noddings says they must “stretch the student’s world by presenting an effective selection of that world with which she [the one-caring] is in contact and to work cooperatively with the student in his struggle towards competence in that world” (p. 167). Teachers/ones-caring use their knowledge and resources to address the questions and problems of the cared-for, a process familiar to librarians as we field questions about reference and problems of accessing and finding materials on varied subjects for varied patrons. Those questions and problems are unique to each individual, and an effective one-caring is attentive to those differences when presenting solutions. The questions and problems of the student worker as cared-for may include how to polish skills necessary for their career goals and transferring those skills to other communities.  

While one goal of ethics of care is to establish reciprocal relationships of care, it is not always the case that the cared-for will participate in caregiving to the one-caring. However, when student workers help their fellow students, they participate in caregiving, taking on a one-caring role themselves. The success lies not in their care being directed back to supervisors, but in their ability to continue this cycle of support within the academic community. 

It is important to note there is a power imbalance in the relationship between a supervisor and a student worker that must be considered to properly enact an ethics of care, an ethic concerned with addressing vulnerabilities. Noddings says of this imbalance, “Social worker and client, physician and patient, counselor and student in their formal roles necessarily meet each other unequally” (p. 62). Crawley et al. (2008) comments in their essay that the recognition of the power imbalances is necessary for a feminist approach to education: “one must consider not only the power relations among classroom actors (e.g., teachers and students) but also the power relations implicit in knowledge construction, ultimately working toward empowerment of students” (p. 3). Recognizing the vulnerability of the cared-for and viewing our actions from their perspective is the first step in addressing the power imbalance inherent in learning and working environments and is also an embodiment of Noddings’ idea of “engrossment.” 

An ethical model that frames interactions between a one-caring and a cared-for has received criticism for being narrow and chiefly concerned with caring for those physically close to you, as opposed to extending care out towards people with whom you may not interact, which is Joan Tronto’s critique of Nodding’s dyadic model (Tronto, 1993). Modern care ethicists have grown the theory to include looking at care from various perspectives, viewing care as a gender neutral activity, and expanding care beyond the encounters of two people. Tronto expands the scope of care beyond relational interactions between educator and the educated, beyond one-caring and cared-for, to institutions, bureaucracies, and governments. Care for people, rather than economics, should be the driving force for these organizations.  

In her 1993 book Moral Boundaries, Tronto describes ethics of care 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, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. (p 103) 

Tronto is often cited in works about using a practice of care in higher education, as the consideration of the institution’s responsibility of care to its workers and students arises. We will reference Tronto’s phases of care and elements of care as it pertains to the role of the librarian supervisor and the evolution of our professional development project.  

Tronto’s phases of care: 

1. Caring about – the act of noticing that care is needed in the first place 

2. Taking care of – taking on the responsibility for caring 

3. Care-giving – the work of giving care 

4. Care-receiving – the response of being cared-for 

Out of these phases of care arise the necessary ethical elements required for care: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, 1993, pp. 127-131). It is these elements that we will further reference in our discussion about enacting care. These are useful for determining how well a project may be adhering to an ethics of care, and we will be using them as we reflect on our project. 

Practices of care regularly show up in areas where there are elements of collaboration, consideration, and concern for vulnerabilities. And it is not surprising that it is demonstrated in professions that have historically been feminized (education, librarianship, etc.) and may shed light on why care-giving is often wrongfully relegated as “women’s work.” Often called the “feminist ethic,” it is important to note that a feminist ethic or practice may be enacted by anyone or any institution.  

Ethics of Care in Libraries and Academia: A Review of the Literature 

In addition to the literature of Noddings and Tronto, the study of using an ethics of care approach in higher education and libraries has shaped this paper and this project as well as work about the importance of student training in academic libraries.  

Ladenson (2017) describes using the feminist framework for reference services in libraries as a practice that is more than simply helping a student find a certain resource but also digging a bit to identify the “why” it is important for them to do so. Is it a passion project? A new curiosity? Why is this interesting? These extra questions invite the students to reflect on their own research and work to establish a beginning of a back-and-forth between the researcher and the library/librarian. Bruce (2020) goes on to say about a caring approach to librarianship: “These one-on-one sessions are not just about the exchange of information. Instead, they are a moment which adds to a student’s sense of belonging and care with regards to their academic and personal selves” (para. 8). The attentiveness and recognition in each individual researcher and each question are elements that re-cast the interaction as practice of care, embodying the ideas of Noddings as well as Tronto. Librarians may find themselves frequently in positions of engaging in care as they establish relationships with library users, guide people through the research process, and advocate for library services to assist users.  

Beyond the library, an ethics of care framework is useful in considering the interactions and responsibilities of the university towards students and the interactions of faculty members with each other to cultivate a supportive learning community. “An Ethic of Care in Higher Education: Well-Being and Learning” (Keeling, 2014) highlights the importance of focusing on the entire student and addressing issues of access for individuals. On the other hand, Sai’s 2024 work highlights that the current practice of most institutions of higher education prioritizes faculty outputs and profit, to the point of neglect for the faculty’s well-being and life outside of the university. These papers act as a call for reimagining the culture of higher education as one that values all members of the academic community as whole people and that values knowledge creation not just as metrics and outputs.  

A similar autoethnographic paper focuses on the concept of “critical friendships” in academia. “Critical friendship: An alternative, ‘care-full’ way to play the academic game” (Sotiropoulou, 2022) looks at the collaborative relationships between academic colleagues, fostering working environments that support others across disciplines: 

Finding the time to get to know each other better and to continuously invest in practicing our critical friendship was a strategy we utilized to deviate from the fast-paced and measurable mandates of the neoliberal academia and our way of prospering both personally and professionally as academics. (p. 1112)   

This approach to collaborating with others, sharing feedback, actively listening, and taking time to meet with and discuss life and careers was a tactic to push against the culture of academia that prioritizes hustle and churning out work. It is a mistake of the neoliberal academic institution that individualizes work, instead of seeing the work of academia as collaborative. Naylor (2023) writes in “A Feminist Ethic of Care in the Neoliberal University”:  

To transform neoliberal academic spaces into spaces that are caring means recognizing that collective support within a department does not have to be an archipelago, but can be contiguous and form a web of reinforcement that does not have strict borders which isolate research from teaching and service. (para. 7) 

Encouraging an environment concerned with care and collaboration in our working and learning environments is a way to push back against hierarchical systems of neoliberal academia that encourage competition and rugged individualism. 

Student Workers (Cared-For) 

On-campus jobs are an opportunity for students to work in environments that allow them to balance the needs of academic work, usually providing flexibility around classes, projects, and exams. Working in an academic library provides student workers a further opportunity to have access to collection materials, a closer connection to faculty, occasional “down time” to work on homework, and opportunities to cultivate transferable soft skills like teamwork and customer service. It is important to note the vulnerable position of student workers, working jobs that offer them flexibility and training but little pay, while primarily focusing on coursework for which they have paid thousands of dollars. 

Student workers in academic libraries engage in customer service, organizational tasks, circulation duties, and the daily tasks necessary for the smooth running of an academic library. Their work brings them into contact with their peers and their professors at the library. Student workers have the opportunity to participate in supporting research, navigating the library collection, and using library technology like scanners and software. These tasks develop and polish skills like communication, critical thinking, and technological proficiency. Mitola, et al. (2018) discuss academic library work as a high-impact practice, saying: “The work experiences of undergraduate students can also shape their college experiences and contribute to the development of skills employers seek in college graduates” (p. 352). 

Student workers, however, are first and foremost students juggling academic and social obligations in addition to working. These competing responsibilities require flexibility and a willingness to understand each unique student’s situation, academic goals, and career aspirations on the part of the supervisor. The academic environment offers a workplace where student-workers are learning about the expectations of professional environments and developing necessary skills, and their supervisors are in a position of educating and training students in these skills. 

The Role of Supervisors (Ones-Caring)  

What is our responsibility to our student workers? How can we approach training and development in a way that is responsive to student workers? How can we prepare students for the working world outside of the university? Asking and exploring these questions represents Noddings’ sense of engrossment for the needs of the cared-for and aligns with Tronto’s framework, specifically embodying the elements of “attentiveness” and “responsibility.”  

Library-specific training and the freedom to explore supplemental career-specific training fosters an environment of growth and supports the further career aspirations and goals of students. It also offers an opportunity to enact care with thoughtful feedback and support. To be able to enact any care successfully, there must already be a groundwork of support and trust established, which is the responsibility of the supervisor to cultivate.  

The academic library serves as an environment for student workers to grow personally and professionally through high impact practices that demonstrate “an affective orientation of care for student employees” (Vine, 2022, conclusion). All this while “respecting other’s positionalities, autonomy and embodied differences and working with them to improve the capacity of those cared for and about to make better decisions” (Sai, 2024, p. 533). By building programs and initiatives that are responsive to student needs, we can support students as they navigate what it means to be a member of a workplace and also provide an opportunity to explore their professional curiosities and talents. 

Competence in supervising students, another of Tronto’s elements of care, requires that supervisors effectively communicate the goals of training or practices. When we discuss students engaging in professional development, we clarify that we intend this project to help develop students’ abilities to articulate their strengths, practicing the task of advocating for themselves in future workplaces. A supportive, caring work environment can reinforce to the students that their labor is valuable and appreciated, hopefully setting the bar for future supervisors and workplaces to meet. 

Why Professional Development? 

How is professional development an act of care? Our goal is not to oil the wheels of capitalism, ensuring that workplaces have well-trained cogs for their machine, but rather to prepare student workers for the transition from an academic environment to the workplace arena. With a focus on setting their own self-development path, a supportive space, and a concern for the costs (time and money) that later professional places may not provide, we want to give students a leg up as they are moving from being student workers to workers.  

The National Association of College Employers (NACE) produces a list of competencies that we use to frame our professional development project. NACE gets these competencies from annually polling many companies about what skills they find valuable in new employees out of college. It is important to note that these professional expectations are coming from employers and professional organizations, who represent The Market. These eight NACE competencies are self-development, communication, technology, equity and inclusion, leadership, critical thinking, professionalism, and teamwork. They also encompass behaviors that can be regarded as caring actions, with the opportunities for the cared-for to engage in the actions of the ones-caring. The practice of these learning competencies may develop behaviors that ripple out to influence other communities.  

We found the NACE framework on the Texas Tech University career center website, among many tips for students preparing and applying for jobs, going on interviews, and preparing to leave the work of being a student for the work of The Market—with its expectations of knowing the rules (rules often left unsaid by a dominant culture). NACE often works in partnership with career centers of universities, the goal being to prepare students for the transition into workplaces. We discovered that it offers many overlapping skills that are useful in learning and working communities. After finding Franklin Oftsund’s (2022) study on career-readiness for student workers, where they also used the NACE framework, we determined it would be useful for our library as well.  

The concept of “professionalism” and success can vary widely based on location, gender expression, and industry. There are many spoken and unspoken rules workers navigate, and learning how to navigate those is a skill in itself. NACE defines professionalism on their webpage “What is Career Readiness” as “Knowing work environments differ greatly, understand and demonstrate effective work habits, and act in the interest of the larger community and workplace” (National Association of College Employers, n.d). NACE writer, Gray (2022) comments that while professionalism can change based on various factors (in-person vs. virtual interactions, industry norms, or geographic location) a common thread is to “show respect for others and make sure you contribute” (para. 17).  

We do not want to surrender to market values, defining worth by marketability, because the human experience encompasses much more. We also want to respect the goals of the students who may aspire to succeed by the definitions of The Market, while also instructing student workers about their successes in skills that may be beneficial in enriching communities. Or as Beilin states it: “We ought to encourage alternative definitions of success while at the same time ensure success in the existing system” (2016, p. 18).  

Returning to Tronto’s definition of care, and speaking to her comment on “repairing our world,” mindfully engaging in promoting supportive and caring work cultures can be considered an attempt to respond to the harm of “hustle culture” and commonplace worker exploitation, especially of new workers starting out on their path. This also speaks to Noddings’ charge that the ones-caring respond to a problem of the cared-for, in this instance the problem of addressing the potential injustice student workers may find in their post-university workplaces.  While our library might be just one small workplace among many, taking care to make it a positive one will hopefully have some ripple effects in the complex web and set a standard of a supportive, inclusive, and compassionate workplace.  

Practice of Care at the Architecture Library 

Now that the theories, supporting literature, and players have all been identified: what does a practical application of care look like? The Texas Tech Architecture Library has engaged in an initiative with its student workers that embodies an ethics and practice of care for nearly two years at this point. Texas Tech is an R1 university with an Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) status since 2019.  Our architecture library is a branch library, embedded in the Huckabee College of Architecture, a program that has over 700 students, undergrad and graduate. Our ones-caring at the library include three faculty librarians and a member of staff who is the direct student supervisor. The reference to “we” throughout this paper is the public services librarian and the member of staff who serves as the direct student supervisor. We have, on average, seven to ten student workers in the role of the cared-for (and, as the job requires, participating in caregiving for library patrons). They are responsible for working at the circulation desk, assisting with scanning issues, pulling and shelving books, and participating in inventory projects. The job involves a lot of interaction with fellow students, members of architecture faculty and staff, and other library departments.  

Noddings says we must address the problems of the cared-for. We do so by offering professional development opportunities to address the problems and expectations of transitioning into post-graduate life and answer the questions of “what skills do I have?” and “how do I leverage this work experience into future work experience?” We want student workers to develop competence to tackle and navigate future workplaces while also supporting their individual interests and building skills that transfer to other communities. During our mid-semester check-ins, we pose questions like “What does professionalism mean to you?” to facilitate discussion and talk about how these skills have been useful in other areas. One student worker commented in our mid-semester check-in that they were applying their practice of leadership to collaborate and communicate better in their student organizations.  

The nature of the student assistant job requires skills that address these competencies like customer service, communication, and time management: soft skills necessary for most workplaces. We wanted the students to consider how else they can grow their skills during their time at the Architecture Library. The inspiration for a professional development project initially came from helping student workers with their resumes and letters of reference. Students often listed their tasks (shelve and organize books, use scanner/printer, check in/out books) and we found ourselves recommending the mention of specific skills, saying “You didn’t JUST check out books! You provided good customer service, communicated library policies, and worked effectively on a library team.” We decided to be clearer about the skills they were engaging in and developing, so that they can recognize the value they brought to our workplace and better articulate their skill sets, strengths, and experience for future jobs. The project also came from a desire to expand the scope of skills that students practice as a way of encouraging self-directed discovery and thinking about how their work in the library could inform their future careers. The NACE competencies were chosen a year into the project as a way to further structure the semester-long project.  

In consideration to the students’ financial situations, these projects are to be done on work time, and to be done with resources freely available to them. Texas Tech has a subscription to a platform called Udemy that the students are encouraged to explore. This platform offers multiple types of online learning materials across many topics. Their access to these materials only lasts while they are students at Texas Tech University. In the future, professional development may have to be on their own time and own dime, but while the library can support this development we feel that we should.   

This approach reflects an ethic of care through the practice of supporting students’ development and fostering skills relevant to their goals. Engaging in this practice through a lens of care means that we must view each student holistically and give support and consideration to their larger aspirations. The supervisor (the one-caring) applies Tronto’s elements of care- attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness—in the development and implementation of the project, while the student worker (the cared-for) practices these elements while engaging in the project.  

An outline of the project as it embodies elements of care: 

1. Each student decides their professional development project based on their wants and needs for growth into their professional aspirations. This demonstrates an attentiveness by the supervisor to encourage students in self-development, and attentiveness by students to reflect on their goals.  

2. The supervisor, as a means of offering guidance and embodying responsibility, provides a list of potential training materials that students can explore.  

3. While a requirement, it is weighted among other tasks so students who do not complete a professional development project have other opportunities to succeed at the job and demonstrate competency with their work.  

4. Students do this work during their working hours with tools available to them for free. This is an act of being attentive to the value of the students’ time, and to offer an opportunity to take advantage of resources made available by the university. This also requires responsibility from the student to prioritize this project as much as their other work tasks. 

5. The supervisor conducts regular check-ins about the students’ professional development progress before end-of-semester evaluations to provide feedback or offer guidance. These check-ins create opportunities for the supervisor and student workers to be responsive to feedback as we finish the semester.  

6. At the end of the semester, the supervisor sends out an anonymous survey to student workers for feedback and adapts projects based on that feedback. The nature of it being a semester-long project means that we can quickly adjust expectations as a way of being responsive to feedback.  

We are now almost two years into this professional development initiative, and the projects that students have chosen have ranged from creating library signage in graphic design software to language learning on DuoLingo to learning industry software like Blender, Rhino, and Grasshopper. Given that many of our students are architecture students, it is not surprising that many have chosen to refine their skills on design software common for their major. This has also had the added benefit of increasing the knowledge of these software for our student patrons, giving our student workers the opportunity to step into the role of teacher/care-giver as they help our student patrons navigate these programs.  

A particularly exciting project a student worker wanted to pursue was to start a book club at the library. This student had been a participating member of many student organizations and wanted to take the opportunity to plan and implement a program for the library. We discussed what a full expression of this project would look like (a process that hits many NACE competencies for the cared-for as well as Tronto’s ideas of attentiveness and responsiveness for the ones-caring). To fully support this project, we explored ways to fund meetings in a library system that does not offer much funding for programs. The public services librarian applied for and was awarded an internal grant for faculty-led book clubs meant to increase participation for those interested in a free book, coffee, and scones. The student worker was responsible for the tasks of choosing the text, signage, and leading discussion prompts. We offered support with the administrative aspects of the grant (ordering materials, reporting receipts, etc), social media posts, and participation in the book group. This specific project required a lot more engagement in Tronto’s elements of care compared to student workers who chose to view and discuss training videos. But being attentive to the individual interests and strengths of this student was required of the ones-caring, a task we were happy to engage in. The results of this project were that our student worker got to perform a project interesting to them with our full support and caring and to give care to the learning community through thoughtful discussions.  

We collect qualitative data during our in-person check-ins as well as the end-of-semester anonymous survey as we attempt to answer the questions: Are we cultivating a supportive workplace? Do the students feel confident in their skills? 
 
At the end of the semester, we discuss how the library can support the career goals of student workers and perform an in-person evaluation that looks at all of their work over the semester. We discuss the semester’s work based on library-specific tasks like shelving, reporting reference interactions, teamwork, and professional development. Generally our feedback from students is positive, though it must be said that the inherent power dynamic between student employee and supervisor must be considered when taking into account in-person feedback, so we provide an anonymous survey for feedback. We enjoy a high level of student retention semester to semester and many student workers recommend their classmates and friends to apply when we have openings.  

While we vary the end-of-semester survey each semester, questions we ask about their professional development have included: 

Student workers responded that they feel like their work in the library is supportive of their future career aspirations and that they felt most confident in “communication” and “professionalism” of the NACE competencies. Students reported feeling very positively about their work and enjoy the fact that they can pursue projects that are interesting to them. They believe they effectively communicate with their team/colleagues and enjoy working with their coworkers.  
 
Quotes from students collected via anonymous end-of-semester anonymous survey: 

While we did not set out to conduct a project guided by the ethics of care, or a feminist approach to supervising students, our interest and engagement with our student workers led, perhaps Noddings would say “naturally,” to enacting one. This professional development initiative demonstrates that an ethics of care approach is not merely a theoretical construct, but a practical method of supporting student workers. Our students have grown in their abilities to communicate their skills and competencies. This practice enriches the cared-for and the workplace, creates meaningful work for the one-caring, and ideally extends out further to other communities.  

Conclusion 

While this project is one element of cultivating a caring and supportive workspace, it is not sufficient enough to be the only element that is necessary for supervising student workers with a praxis of care. The holistic working environment must be operating as a space that seeks to offer care broadly, and this professional development project has been able to grow out of that established space on that groundwork of trust that has been cultivated.  

This approach to workplace dynamics acts as a challenge to traditional transactional labor to a nurturing, collaborative relationship that empowers student workers. Embracing care-centric practices in academic institutions can create environments that create meaningful learning, and teaching, experiences for the academic community, instead of treating them as individual components of an institutional machine.  

Tronto ends her work Moral Boundaries with a call to care:  

To recognize that value of care calls into question the structure of values in our society. Care is not a parochial concern of women, a type of secondary moral question, or the work of the least well off in society. Care is a central concern of human life. It is time we began to change our political and social institutions to reflect this truth. (1993, p. 180)  

We aim to reflect this truth in our small library workplace, where our faculty, staff, and students feel supported, purposeful, and seen.  

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Acknowledgements 

The author would like to thank their peer-reviewers: Pam Lach, Brittany Paloma Fiedler, and Liz Vine as well as the editors of In the Library with a Lead Pipe for their feedback, guidance, and direction during this work. Their care means a lot!  

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