Читать книгу Learning to Connect - Victoria Theisen-Homer - Страница 5

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou

When people talk about their favorite teacher, it is often the teacher who took a special interest in their work, identified their potential in a particular area, helped counsel them through a personal issue, made a piece of literature relevant to their lives, or even attended their quinceañera, bar mitzvah, choral performance, sports game, or other activity. These are the teachers who formed relationships with students, and sometimes influenced the trajectory of their lives. Research also supports the power of meaningful teacher–student relationships to advance students’ social and emotional learning and academic outcomes.^[1]

But it cannot be assumed that forming meaningful connections with students is innate, especially when most teachers come from very different embodied perspectives (in terms of race, ethnicity, class, socioeconomic status, religion, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.) than their students. In fact, connecting across lines of race might be particularly precarious for teachers.^[2] Although race is a social construct, and a single racial category can incorporate several different cultures and ethnicities, skin color is one of the most apparent signifiers of difference and “racial considerations shade almost everything in America.”^[3] For example, research suggests that white teachers often carry “deficit” perspectives of students of color into their practice, impeding the development of meaningful relationships with them.^[4] Because the vast majority of teachers—and those in teacher education pipelines—in the United States are white women, but most students today are not, it is imperative that teacher education programs equip beginning teachers with the relational tools to overcome this “mismatch.”^[5] Unfortunately, there is not enough empirical work on teacher–student relationships, particularly in the field of teacher education.^[6]

There are a few prominent conceptual works of scholarship that focus on teacher–student relationships as a crucial aspect of good teaching across racial and cultural differences.^[7] Moreover, some qualitative scholars have explored what meaningful social justice teaching or culturally relevant pedagogy looks like and found that forming fluid, caring, and humanizing relationships with students of color is an integral part of this.^[8] There are also a number of empirical studies, particularly in the field of educational psychology, that attempt to measure and address the impact of teacher–student relationships on student outcomes; nearly all of these studies find a significant link between meaningful relationships and positive student outcomes.^[9] But we know little about how teacher education programs seek to prepare novices for such relational work.^[10] We know even less about how this preparation translates to beginning practice once teachers are in the field.

Instead, most of the empirical research on teacher education focuses on the “cognitive” aspects of the profession—topics like content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and appropriate scaffolding for students.^[11] What we see as “soft skills” often take a backseat to what are perceived to be harder skills. But this imbalance is unjustified for a few reasons. First, as Carol Lee points out, forming relationships with students involves a great deal of cognition; it requires concerted attention to students’ sense of identity, emotional states, personal goals, learning history, and culture.^[12] Additionally, the basis for these so-called cognitive competencies is often established by teachers’ relational abilities, as they are better able to design curricula and instruction that is appropriate for students when they really know them. And when students leave schools, they are more likely to remember the teacher who “saw” and connected with them on an individual level, than the teacher who was adept at something like lesson plan sequencing and transitions. Truly, most teachers, too, thrive on these connections, which contribute to what Dan Lortie would call “intrinsic rewards.”^[13]

But how do we conceptualize meaningful teacher–student relationships?