Caring in the Digital Classroom : Reassessing Nel Noddings’ Ethics of Care in the Age of Onlineand AI-Mediated Learning

Sammanfattning

This thesis asks what happens to genuine caring in education when teaching moves online or is handed to artificial intelligence. It takes Nel Noddings’ ethics of care as its starting point. Noddings argues that education is, at its heart, a caring relationship. It requires a teacher who is genuinely focused on this particular student’s reality, and a student who recognizes and responds to that attention. The thesis develops the concept of digital care to describe what this kind of genuine caring looks like when it is practiced through digital tools, what conditions it needs in order to survive, and how it differs from the performance of caring that most online and AI- mediated education currently offers instead. Digital care, as this thesis defines it, is not caring with a different medium attached. It is not the performance of caring functions through digital tools. It is genuine caring-for enacted through a digital medium. It requires actual engrossment in the particular student’s reality, actual motivational displacement toward their projects and needs, and genuine completion of the caring relation in the student’s recognition and response. The medium is digital. The caring is real. The distinction between digital care and its institutional substitute, digital caregiving, is the distinction this thesis pursues across six chapters. The thesis makes four original contributions. First, it is the first systematic philosophical examination of Noddings’ ethics of care in relation to digital and AI-mediated education, asking not just whether the framework applies but what it actually requires and where those requirements can no longer be met. Second, it introduces the concept of relational attention. This is the idea that genuine caring presence does not depend on being in the same room as someone. What matters is whether a teacher is truly focused on this particular student as a person, not processing them as a data point. Relational attention can exist in a letter, an email, or a video call. It can also be absent in all of them. The concept gives educators and institutions a clear, practical standard for asking whether what they are doing counts as digital care or only its appearance. Third, it connects Noddings’ framework to the tradition of Bildung, the idea that education is not just about acquiring knowledge but about becoming a person, and argues that this kind of formation requires genuine human encounter that digital caregiving cannot provide. Fourth, and most originally, the thesis identifies what it calls the problem of unrequitable caring. Most discussions of AI in education ask whether AI can genuinely care for students. This thesis argues that the more urgent question runs the other way. Students can develop real emotional investment in an AI tutor. But because the AI cannot actually receive them, cannot be moved by who they are, and cannot complete a caring relationship from its side, the student is always giving care to something that cannot give it back. Over time, this shapes how students understand what caring feels like, and what they come to expect from it. The thesis uses Martin Buber’s distinction between genuine encounter and purely functional interaction to show why digital platforms tend to treat students as data rather than people, and why teachers who want to care genuinely must actively work against that tendency. It maps a spectrum from face-to-face teaching through letters, video calls, asynchronous platforms, and AI tutoring, asking at each point what caring can still look like and where it becomes impossible. Master's Thesis | 2 Eid, L.S.A. (2026) | Caring in the Digital Classroom Drawing on the philosophy of mind, particularly Searle’s Chinese Room argument, it grounds the claim that no current AI system can genuinely be present to a student in the way caring requires. The teaching triangle, developed from D’Olimpio, Gatley and Wareham (2025), shows that when AI replaces the teacher, the loss is ethical as much as it is pedagogical. The thesis concludes with a reconstructed framework built around the concept of relational attention, four principles for ethical digital education, and a developed account of what digital care requires from educators working in digital environments today. It ends with a reflection on what Noddings herself might have made of a world in which we might meet her, for the first time, over Zoom. The concept of digital care – understood as the practice of attentiveness, responsiveness, and relational responsibility in digitally mediated learning environments – is an original contribution of this thesis and remains an open field. Its empirical dimensions, design implications, and policy consequences are questions that future research will need to take up.