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Kinga Varga-Dobai, Georgia Gwinnett College, United StatesAbstract
This paper presents the CARE framework: Compassion, Accountability, Reflection, and Engagement—as a relational model for cultivating teacher leadership and wellbeing in pre-service teacher education. The project illustrates this enactment through service-learning projects designed and implemented by four student teachers at Georgia Gwinnett College, during Spring 2024 and Spring 2025. Informed by engaged pedagogy, social and emotional learning, CARE positions leadership not as positional authority but as ethical, relational, and community-responsive practice. Each component of the framework is elaborated below conceptually and is grounded in empirical illustration. The goal is to demonstrate how pre-service teachers develop leadership dispositions and skills through relationships and community-engaged work. Service-learning provides an especially rich pedagogical site for enacting CARE, as it relies on reciprocal engagement that is informed by accountability and continuous reflection across institutional and community spaces.
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Conference: PCE2026Stream: Nurturing Creativity & Innovation: New
This paper is part of the PCE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Varga-Dobai K. (2026) Cultivating Relational Leadership and Wellbeing Through CARE: A Service-Learning Approach in Teacher Preparation ISSN: 2758-0962 The Paris Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 49-56) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2026.4
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0962.2026.4
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