Paper presentation at Narratives of Care Conference at La Trobe University, Dept. of Social Inquiry

Posted on 17 November 2025

Dr Asha Abeyasekera will present her paper in late November 2025.

The Caring Practices of Moral Education in Sri Lanka’s Secondary Schools

By examining how secondary school teachers in Sri Lanka frame the production of ‘good children’ and ‘responsible citizens’ as an ethical project of care, Dr Abeyasekera's paper draws attention to the ambivalence of care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with teachers in Sri Lanka’s capital city, this paper pays attention to how teachers narrativize their ‘duty of care’ by centring moral education as the overarching ideological goal of education. By identifying three key sites of moral education – religious education, school assemblies, and everyday interactions in the classroom – the paper highlights how cultural discourses about care are embedded in institutional practices and classroom teaching, and shape everyday teacher-student relations. The sites also illuminate three critical themes that trouble conceptualisations of care and our desire to associate care with nurture, selflessness, and wholesomeness. The first describes how teachers narrativize disciplinary practices ranging from humour and becoming a confidante to shaming and corporal punishment as caring practices necessary for moral education. The second draws attention to how schools take it upon themselves to address the asymmetries of care by teaching children the importance of reciprocity enacted through gratitude, respect, and obedience. Finally, the paper draws attention to how children experience morality as an affective experience cultivated by learning how to feel about their practices and relations of care.

Conference: Narratives of Care Conference at La Trobe University, Dept. of Social Inquiry, 20, 21, 24 Nov 2025

Bio:

Asha L. Abeyasekera is a lecturer at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. Her research interests are marriage and kinship; home and homemaking; and morality, emotions, and personhood. Her research combines ethnography with life-history narrative and storytelling. She is the author of Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka (2021, Rutgers)

Key Words:

Moral education; secondary school education; discipline as care; shame; emotions