Learning to Connect. Victoria Theisen-Homer
can and should still be an I–Thou relationship, one built on dialogue, trust, responsiveness, and some degree of reciprocity, where teachers draw students into learning through personal connections and students engage and contribute in ways that inform the teacher.
In contrast, Buber criticizes educational relationships of “compulsion,” where teachers require students to regurgitate the knowledge they have dispensed without engaging with students. Buber believes that establishing I–Thou relationships with students will help them go on to contribute to building a better “community,” whereas relationships of compulsion will contribute to “disunion . . . humiliation and rebelliousness.”[18]
Both Nel Noddings and Paulo Freire explicitly draw upon Buber’s idea of an I–Thou relationship in schools in their own conception of teacher–student relationships. For example, Freire evokes Buber in his description of dialogical relationships between teacher and students. He describes this as a horizontal “I-Thou Relationship” that is “nourished by love, humility, hope, faith, and trust.”[19] Like Buber, Freire warns of the perils of more rigid, perfunctory, and hierarchical forms of teacher–student relationships: “Each time the ‘thou’ is changed into an object, an ‘it,’ dialogue is subverted and education is changed to deformation.”[20] Freire further insists that humanizing teacher–student relationships are especially important for students from “oppressed” groups, who must learn that their voice matters, too.[21] Noddings also cites Buber in her early work, as her conception of care ethics depends on the way that teachers see and receive their students. She, too, distinguishes between two types of caring in schools: (1) the active and engaged form of “caring as relation,” which follows the form of the “I–Thou” relationship, and (2) the passive virtue of “aesthetical caring” in which a person generally “care[s] about” another as they would an “object.”[22] And in recent work, Noddings acknowledges that her conceptualization of care ethics is very much in line with Buber and Freire in that she thinks teacher–student relationships should be trusting, affirming, and responsive.[23]
Buber, Freire, and Noddings all view teacher–student relationships as an active and dynamic exchange that is central to the enterprise of teaching. To them, relationships with students should not be passive or shallow, and they all warn against objectifying students. Instead, they establish the idea of humanizing relationships that are active and dynamic, caring and responsive.
These scholars do not advocate for an equal relationship per se, but a reciprocal one in which the teacher seeks to really “see” and respond to each student as a human being. But these responsive relationships with individual students are not intended to advance student individualism or narcissism. Instead, these theorists suggest that meaningful human relationships with teachers can prepare students to care for others, cultivate community among people, and fight for what Freire calls our “full humanity.” To them, meaningful teacher–student relationships are necessary to create a better world.[24]
Scholars of culturally responsive teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical pedagogy have also taken up the call for more humanizing teacher–student relationships.[25] Since schools have failed to serve students of color for generations, these traditions of educational scholarship call on teachers to reenvision the way they teach and interact with students from historically marginalized groups. Prominent educational scholars—like Geneva Gay, Gloria Ladson Billings, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, and Angela Valenzuela—assert that students of color need teachers who are not simply “nice” but can form critical relationships with them. These scholars conceptualize such relationships as stemming from deep knowledge about individual students, coupled with social awareness and self-reflection on behalf of the teacher; such relationships manifest in active care for students as human beings and curricula and instructional practices that help empower students’ understandings of self and the world. While meaningful and humanizing teacher–student relationships are important for all students, these may be particularly important for historically marginalized students.[26]
Studying Teacher Education for Relationships
Theorists and researchers alike emphasize the weight of teacher–student relationships, but the field of teacher education lacks clear answers to a multitude of relevant questions about how teachers learn to form relationships. How are different teacher education programs approaching this work? How do programs take into account issues of race and racism when preparing preservice teachers to form relationships with all students? What practices seem particularly powerful for these teachers? How do new teachers carry relational learning into the field? And what factors might influence the degree to which teachers use what they have learned to form these relationships? In this book, I address these questions and shed further light on this critical aspect of teaching practice as it is implemented in teacher education programs.
To do so, this book focuses on two well-respected teacher residency programs located in the same city that intentionally tackle relationships and race but in very different ways. Teacher residency programs, which are expanding nationwide, offer a “third way” to educate teachers that attempts to improve upon the shortcomings of both traditional and alternative preparation programs.[27] For example, residencies pair novices with excellent mentor teachers in extended field placements that last up to a full year, often interweave theory and practice in coursework, and employ a cohort model that supports collaboration and discourages traditional teacher silos.[28] In these ways, teacher residencies are designed to resemble medical residencies, in a step toward further professionalizing teaching. Moreover, these features—particularly the extended proximity to students in supportive field placements—seem to make teacher residencies uniquely promising sites for student–teacher relationship development. Early research on residencies indicates they effectively recruit more racially diverse teachers, promote teacher retention, and ultimately improve students’ academic outcomes.[29] However, limited scholarship documents the interworking of these programs, and none of it specifically attends to relationship development.
To explore relationship development in residency programs, I draw upon data from a 2-year ethnographic study of two such programs: one based in a well-established progressive independent school (Progressive Teacher Residency, or PTR), the other in a relatively recent no excuses charter school (No Excuses Teacher Residency, or NETR).[30] I selected these two programs because both espouse distinct missions and have an intentional and explicit focus on the development of teacher–student relationships, something that is not common among teacher education programs. They each also have excellent reputations within their respective circles (no excuses or progressive).[31] In many ways, these two programs reflect the potential of “mission-driven” residency programs to help novice teachers learn to form meaningful relationships with students.[32] However, they approach this work very differently, offering an illuminating contrast that exposes the complexity of relational work and the way it is deeply intertwined with context.[33]
In the first year of this study, I embedded myself in these two programs. I observed coursework and activities, interviewed faculty and residents, and collected documents along the way. The stark juxtaposition between No Excuses Teacher Residency (NETR) and Progressive Teacher Residency (PTR)—which one of my colleagues referred to as “whiplash”—enabled me to see aspects of each approach to teacher education that I might not have otherwise identified. Then in the second year, I followed two white residents from each program (four in total) into their first full-time school sites.
Although I intentionally interviewed residents of color to shed light on their responses to residency coursework, I chose to follow white teachers into their first classrooms because not only do they represent the vast majority of the teaching force, but research also suggests they have more work to do to form meaningful relationships with students of color.[34] In the process, I got to know the four focal teachers, which allowed me to better understand how they brought their biography, personality, and goals into their work. Focusing on these teachers also allowed me to discern how they carried their program learning into the field and whether school factors influenced their ability to connect with students in line with their training.
There