Reshaping Relationships

Last week in “Coming of Age in a Time of Perils” I set the stage for this post’s discussion of how relationships between teachers and students might respond to these times. These two posts will draw from a research paper I wrote this past fall called Reshaping Teacher-Student Relationships Amidst Crises of the Anthropocene.

The crises of the Anthropocene will put pressure on the key relational component of successful education. Already the voices of student activists and the messages implicit in more diffuse intergenerational communication suggest strains on aspects of teacher-student relationships. Students increasingly do not trust that adults in positions of power have their best interests in mind, they are skeptical of the seat of authority from which adults can share knowledge and wisdom, and they believe that adults do not respect their worldviews or believe that adults are protecting their right to a promising future.

I therefore arrive at a trio of specific relational constructs that are essential components of a healthy educational ecosystem and are at unique risk during this time of rapid change, disruption, and uncertainty:

1. Trust: Students’ belief that their teachers have their best interests in mind.
2. Epistemic authority: Students’ beliefs that their teachers possess useful and valuable knowledge, experience, and wisdom.
3. Respect: Students’ belief that teachers value and care about their identities and futures, and that their teachers possess characteristics or traits that they want to emulate.

These three relational constructs are highly intertwined, essential for successful education, and under imminent if not already present threat as students become increasingly aware of an increasing number of crises. Unlike so many diagnoses of the Anthropocene, however, relational restoration is immediately actionable for educators and addressing these threats may be a promising first step towards building the momentum for future systemic change.

Trust

Trust in education is a multi-directional, multi-party concept with manifestations at multiple levels of relationships and systems. Although collective trust, teachers’ trust of students, and faculty’s trust in one another are all important, I focus on the interpersonal trust from students to their teachers because it is directly implicated in intergenerational conflict and is a direct feature of teachers’ actions (Schneider & Bryk, 2002).

Americans’ trust in teachers hit an all-time low in the latest Gallup poll (Saad, 2022). Students — largely left voiceless in these polls — are left to grapple with the dissonance of growing up in a world where adults question teachers and institutions about topics like climate change while also increasingly hearing about its effects on social media or feeling them directly (Preston, 2021).

Monica Platz writes that trust between a student and their teacher is “crucially dependent on the relationship that connects them. This relationship, in order to provide reasons for trust, must be sufficiently personal. This means, first, that the relationship involves some form of shared reality” (2021, p. 690). The student climate protests of 2019 and others like them are a clear expression of students experiencing widely disparate realities than those they see in power. Shared reality — and any potential for trust — is thus shattered.

The trust that emerges from a strong relationship between a student and their teacher is in turn an important predictor of positive student outcomes. Student trust of teachers is positively associated with socioemotional student outcomes including students’ positive assessment of their own character (Corrigan et al., 2010) and a sense of belonging and valuing of school outcomes (Mitchell et al., 2018). These mechanisms may mediate the positive association between trust and academic outcomes measured by test scores and self-regulated learning (Russell et al., 2016), and these results paint a clear picture of the essential role of trust in a healthy educational experience for students.

Building trustful relationships

When the stakes are as high as they are today for students and for humanity, teachers must intentionally build the connection, collaboration, listening, and affirmation that research shows leads to trusting relationships. It is this trust that enables the beneficial student outcomes needed in our educational systems today. To maintain the possibility of trust with students, teachers need mechanisms through which they can co-create with students a shared picture of the world and our position in it.

Many teachers are already daily practitioners of attempting to understand the world with their students instead of trying to communicate their understanding of the world to their students. Small practices can progressively build trusting relationships, from asking students what they have seen or how they feel about future events to asking students what they wish adults in their life knew about their perspectives. Using time like advisory or homeroom to have open conversations with students can make routine a pedagogical stance where the teacher prioritizes listening and perspective-taking and gives students an outlet to feel seen and heard.

These practices can render teachers and students emotionally vulnerable, and educational settings with diverse worldviews and political perspectives complicate the practice of communal sense-making. Trust is hard won and easily lost, so here educational institutions and teacher training programs can provide professional development and support for teachers seeking to better gain the trust of students. Supporting the honing of skills like active listening and affirmation are often components of teacher support, but a new emphasis needs to be placed on application specifically to emotionally charged topics like climate change, misinformation, and economic or political strife. Katherine Schultz says that centering listening in teaching is “a critical starting place for the development of a pedagogy of trust” (2015, p. 149) and Nel Noddings shows that “dialogue is fundamental in building relations of care and trust” (2012, p. 775). Teachers need explicit training and practice for how to walk the fine line between the genuine search for understanding and performative listening, a distinction which students are all-too-good at spotting.

Today’s students are not just caught up in their own personal lives, but also in an unfolding global drama to which they have front-row seats through social media. If teachers can employ interpersonal skills to demonstrate care and concern for students and earn their trust, they reestablish the full ability to teach the content and socioemotional skills that students will need to be resilient in the face of impending crises (Consiglio, 2022).

Epistemic authority

The demands of the Anthropocene on educators include more than just a need for strong interpersonal trust; educators urgently must also equip students with skills, knowledge, and epistemic habits that will help them become innovative, resilient, and empowered. Marie Brennan writes that “education is not only about passing on past knowledges and practices but importantly about entrusting the future to the next generations, equipping them with capacities to survive, to organize, to think and plan and act” (2017, p. 45). To do this students need to believe that their teachers know things that are both true and worth knowing.

Zachary Stein describes teacherly authority as the “epistemic right, or the epistemic duty of a person who knows more, or has more capacity, to shape a person who has less” (Henderson, 2019). Non-coercive, authentic epistemic authority enables intergenerational transmission of knowledge, experience, and wisdom and instills in students an intrinsic desire to learn from their teacher. While there is much knowledge that students can and should create and discover for themselves, to limit transmission of knowledge to only this mechanism would be both a mistaken ideal as well as a rejection of the reality of most education systems as they currently function.

Monika Platz notes the compatibility of epistemic authority with student autonomy: “While education should always aim at helping the students see things for themselves, it cannot be avoided that in school education there are many instances of telling. This implies that much of the knowledge that students acquire at school is justified by the teacher’s epistemic authority” (2021, p. 692). The “telling” need not invoke the didactic, student-as-vessel, banking concept of education infamous as the target of Friere’s ire (1970). Justified epistemic authority is an interpersonal contract accepted by both student and teacher and a legitimate and important way for societies to transmit accumulated knowledge.

Epistemic authority is under threat when students skip school to reject long-established political and economic doctrine and express their anger and anxiety about the uncertainty of their futures. In Youth in the Anthropocene, Reingard Spannring asserts that “The Anthropocene calls into question the utility of the notion of education as the transmission of knowledge, skills, and norms” and that “there is no longer a valid frame of reference, which the older generation could pass on. All generations are immigrants in a new era” (2021, p. 124). Spannring argues that epistemic knowledge in Anthropocene education has primarily been wielded to prepare students, as Orr puts it, “to be more effective vandals of the earth” (2004, p. 5).

These threats to epistemic authority are situated within a broader malaise of dismissal of experts despite our increasing reliance on the knowledge of others to navigate and understand our complex world (Eyal, 2019). Yet to give up on epistemic authority as a possibly healthy and productive feature of teacher-student relationships is to forget the genuinely important content knowledge that many teachers hold and most students do not. It is therefore the responsibility of conscientious and concerned educators — and the systems that train them — to navigate how to repurpose epistemic authority for beneficial use amidst the crises of the Anthropocene.

Leveraging and letting go of epistemic authority

Educators — who by default are often placed in positions of authority by modern education systems — can justify this positioning by actively seeking to become more knowledgeable in the details of Anthropocene science, economics, politics, and philosophies. A report published by the Yale Program on Climate Change found that 70 percent of middle school and 55 percent of high school science teachers do not recognize the scientific consensus on climate change (Cheskis et al., 2018). Even as these teachers shift towards acceptance, a strong understanding of the complex issues of climate change is clearly an impediment to epistemic authority. Teachers have a duty to cultivate in themselves — and in their colleagues — the knowledge, capacity, and wisdom that give them something worth sharing with their students to help them better make sense of Anthropocene phenomena. Just as other professionals practice continuing education to remain useful in their fields, teachers need to seek truth and knowledge in complex topics of our time in order to be useful sources of wisdom and understanding for their students.

Adding more work to teachers’ plates is rarely a popular or feasible solution, so teachers can more readily relinquish authority when appropriate and elevate students themselves as the experts of their own time and experiences. Professors at the University of Vermont handed off the reins of a course called Sense of Place in the Anthropocene entirely in a students-teaching-students model as an “intentional breakdown of the hierarchical knowledge paradigm” (Gaspero-Beckstrom & Mighell, 2019, p. 2), and anonymous feedback affirmed that students felt “positive and inspired” about the format (p. 37).

In Taking the moral authorship of children and youth seriously in times of the Anthropocene, Sporre et al. argue that “education is and can become a freedom seeking process in which children are offered opportunities to develop their language and reasoning, including their critical abilities to express reasoning(s) around their moral concerns” (2022, p. 113). A willingness to listen to the unique knowledge students bring to their own education builds trusting relationships and creates a contrast that strengthens the effect of times when teachers do invoke their epistemic authority. This balance supports a healthy bidirectional epistemic relationship between teacher and student, which is essential for holding students to a standard for accepting established facts and reality.

Teachers can also look to non-White, non-Western ontologies and epistemics to broaden students’ understandings of ways of knowing. Fikile Nxumalo describes how ways of knowing and relating to the non-human from Black and Indigenous traditions “have much to teach us about hope in current times of environmental precarity” and can “unsettle persistent Western humanisms and universalisms that Anthropocene discourses often (even if inadvertently) reproduce” (2020, p. 552). Many scholars note the ways in which Indigenous communities have already lived through their own apocalypses and have had to find ways to preserve their cultures and endure, providing tremendous wisdom for recent times of trouble (Whyte, 2017). This approach situates teachers’ epistemic authority among many ways of learning and knowing, contextualizing rather than undermining their students’ relationship to teachers’ authority.

These responses can and should be pursued in conjunction, meaning teachers need practice and training to help them understand when to draw upon their epistemic authority to teach students essential skills and knowledge and when to step back and acknowledge the authority of other peers, experts, or communities. If teachers can maintain student trust and strike this delicate balance between harnessing epistemic authority and encouraging student self-discovery and autonomy, the next responsibility for teachers in the Anthropocene is to earn students’ respect by demonstrating that they are active agents in attempts to make the world better for their students.

Respect

Like trust, respect in teacher-student relationships is bidirectional and recursive. Teachers demonstrating respect for their students is essential for earning respect in return, and both directions of respect are linked with positive student outcomes (Meador, 2019; Mertz et al., 2015). Students have respect for educators when they believe that their teachers value and care about their identities and their future and that their teachers possess characteristics or traits that they want to emulate. Gaining respect is accordingly the subject of a plethora of articles and blogs for new teachers, and losing it is widely understood as one of the fastest ways to foreclose the potential for trusting relationships and sharing of knowledge.

Respect is often invoked to admonish younger generations, but these demands are a surefire way for an educator to lose respect, as students give respect when they feel it (Sparks, 2016). Educational consultant Joe Martin writes, “The truth is, times have changed. Long gone are the days when a teacher’s presence alone demanded respect…We have to get respect the hard way — we have to earn it” (2022, n.p.). It is a teacher’s actions and character, Martin writes, that earns them the respect of students.

Cultural narratives abound about the recent destruction of traditional respect for teachers. The National Education Association reported 53% of public schools facing understaffing and 55% of teachers saying that they’ll leave teaching earlier than planned (Walker, 2022a, 2022b), a situation Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called “a symptom of teacher respect issue, really” (Croll, 2022). A Harris Poll in 2014 found that 79% of American adults believed that students respected teachers when they used to be in school, but only 31% believed that students respected teachers today (Shannon-Missal, 2014). A 2022 national survey of 1,200 teachers found that 65% of educators say that there is less respect for the profession now than when they started teaching (“TPT Special Data Report”). Even in a country like Finland known for high levels of respect for teachers, “teachers do not have the same authority and respect” in this “changing world” (Punakallio & Dervin, 2015, p. 314).

A task for teachers aiming to balance respect for students with respect for reality is therefore to walk the fine line between affirming a student’s beliefs and feelings while also challenging them to think more critically or consider other perspectives. The expert teacher does so skillfully; it is no wonder that the teachers we often respect most in retrospect are not the ones who were easiest or most fun, but those who could push us to grow and to learn because we had earned their respect.

Restoring mutual respect

To demonstrate their notice of students’ concerns and initiate a cycle of mutual respect, teachers need to prioritize listening and schools and systems need to create spaces where this direction of communication is expected. Linda Inlay describes listening groups where advisors regularly gather with a small group of students to hear their thinking, questions, and concerns (2016). Treating these student-centered experiences as just as important as classroom instruction time is a step teachers can take to show and thus earn respect. There are clear synergies with building trust and healthy epistemic authority, making listening a key stance that all teachers should seek to prioritize in their practice.

A more challenging and personal task that educators in the Anthropocene must pursue is demonstrating agency and action in the face of the crises that students fear. Canute Thompson recommends that educational organizations create ways for students to clearly see respect for them expressed or acted upon (2018) and Inlay calls teacher attitudes an “implicit curriculum” that subtly affects how students perceive their teachers. She argues that teachers need to continue to grow not just professionally, but also personally to earn students’ respect (2016).

Although systemic political and economic changes are ultimately needed to avoid the most catastrophic effects of Anthropogenic crises, in teacher-student relationships small individual actions do still have a role in signaling respect and concern. Teachers should not underestimate the effect of taking sustained, genuine personal stances to demonstrate regularly to students that they are exercising any agency they have to protect their students’ futures. For example, Suzanne Rice argues that teachers can take a more active role in acknowledging the animal suffering, environmental harms, and social justice issues involved in the production and consumption of meat by publicly pursuing vegetarianism. This “ecologizing of education with respect to diet” is one instance where teachers can use their actions to shift the hidden curriculum towards a culture that affirms students’ concerns over justice and the health of the environment (2018, p. 471).

This project of self-assessment and demonstration of commitment to principles is already the standard in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) professional development. Most action plans, blogs, and guides about DEIJ initiatives center teachers’ personal work as a prerequisite for productive relationships and engagement with students (McClendon, 2022; Moratto, 2020). A plethora of tools — Project Implicit Free, Cultural Competence Self-Assessment, Intercultural Development Inventory, Leadership for Equity Assessment & Development, and more — help leaders and educators grapple with their own role in unjust systems and how their histories and complicities impact their ability to connect with and teach students (S. Anderson, 2021; Larson et al., n.d.; Turner-Cmuchal et al., 2021).

Most crises of the Anthropocene are also crises of justice, so teachers should therefore take on a similar personal responsibility when it comes to political, economic, or climate crises that trouble students today. Students are well-practiced in identifying and rejecting performative personal actions, so teachers need to approach this project with a long view of steady growth and progress in mind. By making a commitment to students’ futures visible in day-to-day actions, teachers earn the respect of students and can continue to engage in the teaching and caring needed to educate a generation inheriting an uncertain and scary world.

Call to Action

For his new book Educating for the Anthropocene anthropologist Peter Sutoris claims that “Never in history has education played a more critical role in determining the future of humanity than in the Anthropocene” (2022, n.p.). Zachary Stein describes how “a vast web of life now depends on our stewardship,” which is “a profound educational challenge and a historical opportunity” (2019, p. 67). And yet, as Marie Brennan writes in Struggles for teacher education in the age of the anthropocene, in the face of this critical responsibility educators “depress our knowledge of the significance of the converging crises and then act surprised when there are uprisings, demands, movements which try to address elements and consequences of these crises” (2017, p. 44).

Donna Haraway implores readers to (2016b), “stay with the trouble” so that we may better serve a generation of rightfully anxious, angry, and scared students. In Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, Daniel Sherrell argues for “honest sorrow”: “To mourn without fighting is to tap out at the exact moment we need to step in, but to fight without mourning is to grapple with a ghost, to try to stop something you’ve never actually realized” (2021, p. 246). But this is what educators so often must do for our students, and part of what draws many of us to the profession in the first place. Even if education through traditional state-sponsored institutions may not ultimately be sufficient as Sutoris suggests (2022), some sense of relationship between teacher and student will remain essential.

In one of Silova’s “Three Provocations” for educators in the Anthropocene, she writes that “our survival depends on our capacity to imagine and learn new ways of living with each other, with other species, and with the Earth” (2021, p. 593). Underlying this sentiment — and those of many others cited above — is a call for new forms of relationality. To preserve functioning systems of education — and humanity as a whole — through the Anthropocene, a variety of relationships require metamorphosis: those between humans and nature, economics and growth, politics and tribalism, social media and attention, and so on. Positioning relationships between teachers and students as the primary focal point for understanding education in the Anthropocene supports progress towards remaking these other relationships too, as education is our best and perhaps only mechanism for teaching young generations about the world as it is and inspiring them to imagine what it could yet be.

Trust, acknowledgement of epistemic authority, and respect are not switches that can be flipped only in the realm of the relationship between teacher and student. By pursuing these goals in education, where so much human knowledge, wisdom, and ways of being pass hands, teachers are seeding a broader revolution in the ways human beings relate to the world. The process of creating shared reality with students requires seeing the world through the eyes of a child who has their future before them. How might this change our views of destructive, extractive economics? How might a young students’ idealism cut through our adaptive pessimism, through our learned othering of the non-human? What beauty might come from classrooms built on these relational pillars, desperately needed well beyond the walls of schools?

This work for educators will neither be easy nor fast, but it is work that teachers have already been seeking to accomplish in some sense for time eternal. With new urgency, intentionality, innovation, and cooperation teachers can reinvent our relational stance towards students and invite the next generations to do in, with, and for the world what we could not.

Full citations for the papers referenced above can be found here.