The core of teaching is the relationship of care between the student and the teacher. A community can be created in the classroom that honors and respects the inherent worth of each individual and through such mutual respect students and teachers can experience success. The suffering and the successes that teachers experience are central to the way they care for their students. There is currently a great deal of focus on education and schooling in the United States and generally this focus ignores the necessity and vitality of the relationship of care. Teachers must daily support and care for students who have great struggles and great triumphs. In my dissertation, I will explore the nature of the experience of these teachers as they work with students who experience suffering and success. I will identify the themes of their experience using a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology based on the work of Max Van Manen. This dissertation is essentially a philosophical examination of the nature of teachers’ care for students and how they manifest the experience of suffering and success of those students. Therefore it is a deeply phenomenological work, bound not by the empirical, but by the life- worlds of the participants and of the author. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/et
