Read more
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.
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: No Excuses Teacher Residency
Chapter 1: An Instrumental Approach
Chapter 2: License for Navigation
Chapter 3: The NETR Brand
Part 2: Progressive Teacher Residency
Chapter 4: Cultivating Reciprocal Relationships
Chapter 5: Below the Surface
Chapter 6: Learning the Ropes
Part 3: Into the Field and Beyond
Chapter 7: From Learning to Teaching
Chapter 8: Contradictions in the Field
Chapter 9: Lessons on Relationships
Epilogue
Methodological Appendix
Bibliography
About the author
Victoria Theisen-Homer is a postdoctoral research fellow at Arizona State University's School of Social Transformation. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies in Education at Harvard, she was an English teacher at a large public Title-1 high school in Los Angeles.
Summary
Learning to Connect explores how two different teacher education programs–No Excuses Teacher Residency and Progressive Teacher Residency–attempt to prepare preservice teachers for meaningful relationships with students, especially across racial and cultural differences.
