Learning to Connect: Relationships, Race, and Teacher Education

Learning to Connect explores how teachers learn to form meaningful relationships with students, especially across racial and cultural differences. To do so, the book draws on data from a two-year ethnographic study of No Excuses Teacher Residency (NETR) and Progressive Teacher Residency (PTR), and teachers that emerge from each program. Each program is characterized in rich complexity, with a focus on coursework relating to relationships and race, as well as fieldwork. The final part of the book explores how program graduates draw upon these experiences in their first year of full-time teaching. Two very different visions and approaches to teacher-student relationships emerge - one instrumental, the other reciprocal, with implications for the students ultimately served by each approach. Through engaging portraits and illustrative case studies, this rigorously researched yet eminently accessible book will help teacher educators (and likely other scholars, teachers and policymakers, too) to better conceptualize, support, and practice the formation of meaningful relationships with students from all backgrounds. Ultimately, Learning to Connect offers a hopeful path forward as educators become better equipped to model meaningful human connections with students, which might be especially necessary in today’s deeply divided society.