Developing Productive Student-Teacher Relationships Through a Multidimensional Caring Approach to Elementary Mathematics Teaching

• In Event: Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Research: A Social Justice Approach to Teaching and Learning

Abstract

There have been calls from the field of teacher education to investigate the relational aspects of teaching more closely and understand how teachers build relationships with their students. In this paper, the author describes her experiences as a teacher-researcher who drew on theories of care to design and implement a pedagogical approach to mathematics practice that explicitly aimed to enable the development of student-teacher relationships in one fourth-grade classroom. Data sources include a teacher journal, audio-recorded lessons, and student work. Results illustrate how dimensions of care manifested themselves in my mathematics instruction across a 12-week teaching intervention and suggest that building productive working relationships with students that positively influence student mathematical learning and dispositions is intentional and complex work.

Author

• Nancy Tseng, San Francisco State University