SIDLIT 2026

In this presentation I will share the results of a recently completed study of graduate students' lived experience of a pedagogy of care in an online asynchronous learning environment. The results are compared to the experiences of undergraduate students reported in the scholarly literature.  The study focused exclusively on graduate students and aims to current research on the application of Noddings’ (2013) model of care to online contexts. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, we analyzed participant-generated documents within an online, asynchronous course. Findings revealed few differences between graduate and undergraduate experiences of care pedagogy. Results support two proposed extensions to Noddings’ framework: Robinson et al.’s (2020) division of modeling to two contexts, course design and teaching, and Byrd et al.’s (2025) concept of anticipation. Although limited in generalizability, this exploratory qualitative study contributes to understanding an understudied population and reinforces evidence that care-centered pedagogy can mitigate negative aspects of asynchronous learning, such as feelings of isolation and disempowerment (Burke & Lamar, 2021), which are associated with reduced learning success.