“Some Teachers Just Simply Care”: Respect in Urban Student-Teacher Relationships

Teachers are ethically obligated to care for their students. One overlooked means of demonstrating care is through respect. However, because respectful behaviors are culturally dependent, exploring experiences of respect from students of color is needed to provide insight into student-teacher relationships. To understand students’ experiences of respect from teachers in the school setting, we interviewed 12 adolescents and emerging adults of color (M age = 17, SD age = 1.81) who attended Urban schools, about their experiences of respect from their teachers. We deductively and inductively coded the interviews separately for definitions of respect and experiences of respect from teachers using six themes of respect. Ultimately, youth often defined respect as the golden rule and politeness. However, when discussing instances of respect with teachers, youth described teachers demonstrating care for students’ personal lives and academic success. Our findings suggest that students identify behaviors associated with care as respectful, which diverge from decontextualized definitions of respect. Policy changes should focus on promoting student-teacher relationships, focusing on culturally sensitive teaching and caring for students. Specifically, policy should support classroom level changes, such as the co-construction of respect expectations between students and teachers

Searching for the Golden Rule: A Case Study of Two White Novice Teachers\u27 Beliefs and Experiences of Respect in Urban Schools

Student respect toward teachers is traditionally considered in terms of behavior or authority. Yet, because of cultural differences and historic oppression of marginalized students in schools, not all students express respect in ways in which teachers are familiar. Because of structural inequalities and individual differences, standard behavioral definitions of respect are insufficient to address how students and teachers actually experience respect in the classroom. Using a comparative case study design, this study examined two female White novice teachers’ beliefs and experiences of student respect within a novel relational respect framework. Results identified that teachers’ respect beliefs were based on notions of authority, while respect experiences reflected authority and relationship based respect. Importantly, these relationships were conceptualized as role model and friend-based respect. To help novice teachers balance their roles as both caring and authoritative figures, I propose that student respect should be thought of in relational, rather than behavioral, terms, and that teachers need to employ cultural competence when developing and maintaining their student–teacher relationships

“You don’t wanna teach little kids about climate change”: Beliefs and Barriers to Sustainability Education in Early Childhood

To support a sustainable planet, preschools need to engage young children with sustainability education. In the United States of America (USA), nature-based preschool programs are likely to promote environmental science and nature education, given their outdoor curricula, but very little is known about how these programs might also cultivate sustainability education. The purpose of the present study was to investigate nature-based preschool teachers’ craft knowledge (Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992) about sustainability education within curricula as they presently exist. We interviewed 22 early childhood educators and administrators across nine early childhood nature-based education centers in the Northeastern United States. Following Davis\u27 (2010) differentiation of education in, about, and for the environment, we found that most participants promoted activities in the environment, such as children spending time outdoors in the woods. Educators reasoned that they focused on promoting in-nature based activities because they believed that caring for and loving nature were foundational to promoting sustainability practices. Also, the educators promoted simple everyday pro-environmental behaviors, such as reusing containers, as they believed such acts lead to lifelong sustainable behaviors. Ultimately, we found that almost all of the teachers who participated in our study wanted to include sustainability education within their pedagogical approaches, and they did so by focusing on “every-day sustainability practices,” but felt they could not engage in more ethically-driven sustainability practices due to curricular and parental barriers

Respect in the Classroom: A Developmental Approach

This article examines respect through Piaget\u27s theory, recent empirical research, and exemplary practice in order to highlight a developmental approach to understanding and fostering respect in the classroom

Short-Term, Faculty-Led Study Abroad and Global Citizenship Identification: Insights from a Global Engagement Program

Short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs are increasingly featured in higher education internationalization efforts. As noted in the literature, such programs can aid in the development of varied student outcomes, including developing global citizenship. This paper presents an examination of the Global Engagement Seminar (GES) program, a short-term, faculty-led program at a private women’s liberal arts college that has expressed a firm commitment to internationalization. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine whether participation in the GES program influenced participants’ antecedents, identification, and pro-social values of global citizenship (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller 2013a), and how the relationships compare with those of a matched comparison sample. The results of the survey indicated that GES completion moderated some but not all of the paths in the global citizenship model. Completing a GES was associated with non-significant relations among the moderated paths, a finding that emphasizes the need for a nuanced discussion of the complex relationship between short-term study abroad and global citizenship. Implications for faculty-led global engagement programs that aim to promote global citizenship among undergraduates in liberal arts contexts are discussed

The Relation Among Respect Descriptions, Being Respected, and Peer Social Competence in Middle Childhood

Respect is an important aspect of children’s social lives. This study addressed the larger question of “What does it mean for a child to be respected by peers?” by examining three distinct, but interrelated research questions: (1) How do children describe their respect experiences? (2) Are children’s respect descriptions related to self and peer evaluations of respect in the classroom? (3) Can peer-respected children be empirically differentiated into groups in order to relate differences in the respect groups to differences in peer social competence? Participants were 198 third through sixth grade students. Each child wrote descriptions of what it means to respect someone and completed measures of self- and peer-evaluations of respect and social competence. The results indicated that children described respect in various ways with the most common description being “prosocial behavior.” However, the number of respect descriptors and their level of complexity increased with grade level. Moreover, the more children described respect as a give-and-take relationship, the less likely they were to rate themselves as being respected; the more children described respect as accepting the differences of others, the greater their ratings were on a variety of respect measures. Finally, children were categorized into three groups of being respected: a low respect group, an average respect group, and a high respect group. The children in low respect group were more victimized, aggressive, and lonely, as compared to children in the other groups. Children in the high respect group were more popular, more sociable, and more preferred by peers than children in the other groups. These results indicated that being highly respected was associated with positive peer behaviors, and being low in respect was associated with negative peer behaviors. This study provides an empirical starting point for understanding what respect among children entails, how respect functions within the peer group setting, and how respect relates to children’s social competences. Implications for the study of respect within children’s peer relations were discussed