Practice and Theory of Relationship-rich Pedagogies

High quality faculty-student relationships drive the development of character virtues. Lily Fowler describes teaching strategies that create connection and whole-person learning.

A brief video and accompanying resources describe relationship-rich education, its benefits, and approaches to make classrooms into relationship-rich spaces.

This podcast episode features guests Isis Artze-Vega and Oscar Miranda Tapia discussing their book Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education. They share student perspectives on college connections and how students can use their agency, in large and small ways, to pursue meaningful relationships.

This text is unique in how it presents sociomaterialism in the context of teaching and learning. The book sections focusing on Relationality in Higher Education, Relationships with Students, Relationships with Others, and Relationality and the Sociomaterial contain implications for practice with rich inter- and multi-disciplinary connections to theory.

Noddings describes teaching from the perspective of "care ethics," with elements in "establishing and maintaining relations of care and trust which include listening, dialogue, critical thinking, reflective response, and making thoughtful connections among the disciplines and to life itself."

Using Relational Cultural Theory as a backdrop and lessons learned through her own classroom experience, Schwartz shows us teaching as "a practice wherein connection and disconnection with students, power, identity, and emotion shape the teaching and learning endeavor."