Relational Learning

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

The conceptual model behind relational learning represents a revolutionary reconsideration of the conventional teacher-centered classroom by suggesting that real learning, that is the comprehension of new information and the application of that new information in original ways and in problem solving, can best be done in communities of people not designated into roles such as teacher and students. In practice, relational learning encourages students to learn from each other and for teachers to learn as well from their students and from their reactions to and questions about the material. Within such a collaborative effort, education achieves its primary goal.

Overview

A traditional classroom can be unintentionally intimidating. For more than two centuries, teachers were assumed to be the smartest person in a classroom, and every element of the classroom was pre-designed to bring that point home. The standard floor plan of a typical classroom would put the teacher in an appropriately large desk in the front (or sometimes in the back to give the unblinking eyes of the teacher complete surveillance). Often the dominance of that authority-site would be underscored by a bulky lectern or podium as a way to both establish the teacher’s position and to separate the teacher from the students themselves, a podium serving as a kind of protective wall. The teacher would stand and deliver from the podium, the material would flow in a downward dynamic. After all, the teacher had the degrees, the expertise, the experience, and the answers. The teacher had information the student was to learn. Students would be sitting in rigidly maintained arithmetically clean rows of desks, apart from each other, often in assigned seats. The assumption was that education could happen only in strictest silence, save for the teacher’s voice and the occasional scratching of chalk on the chalkboard.

In what Dyke (2015) dismisses as education by “transmission,” classroom time itself would be filled with teacher lectures often complemented by students completing some sort of worksheet, essentially busy work. Laughter was seen as out of place, and students who attempted to engage in any sort of conversation with others were deemed nuisances and often would be punished for communicating with their peers outside of recess and lunch periods. Education was best achieved on a schedule—teachers working from carefully designed lesson plans with clear objectives for each period and the students listening, taking notes or keeping handouts against some future assessment.

As standardized testing became more central to schools as measures of performance, the education system inadvertently encouraged students as they progressed from kindergarten to high school to view other students as competition, each competing for points and grades, often using methods that neglected critical thinking and the mysterious process of analysis in favor of getting answers right on multiple choice tests. Critics charged that nothing in the real world, apart from brutal authoritarian governments, worked so diligently to quash original thinking, creativity, and questioning (Smyth, McInerney & Fish, 2013), and that such a system inevitably produced students who would be problematic hires in the workforce.

In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists visited remote regions in central Africa, the Australian Outback, rain forests of South America, and even the American Plains, and they found that in older cultures, the work of showing young people the ways of the world was universally done in non-threatening circles, the elder in charge of the education sitting in the center or sitting in the circle, listening to the questions, guiding the responses, encouraging the children themselves to solve the very questions they were raising by building on what they already knew. The sessions were informal and unplanned. The elder-teacher might introduce a topic and then allow the dynamic of the children and their questions and answers to guide the development of the class. Knowledge was passed without pressure or stress, the children relishing the feeling that they were teaching themselves and that the world was opening up for them.

For U.S. educators, the implications of that concept applied to a classroom were revolutionary. Indeed, the concept runs entirely counter to Western notions of intellectual development (Hodkinson, 2005). Not entirely surprising, the initial attempts to apply such relational learning came from the counseling community that had long stressed the need for communication in any attempt to grow emotionally and psychologically. Jean Baker Miller, a therapist and social activist in California in the mid-1970s, first codified the notion that self-reliance and independence, so ingrained in the American character, were in fact a dead end if a person wanted to really grow, to be creative, and to be confident. Relationships were at the center of the human experience. Isolation and competition, hierarchies and authoritarian style pedagogies damaged the evolution of the mind and the heart.

When the theoretical paradigm began to be applied to the classroom—most prominently in the advocacy of Joyce K. Fletcher, a developmental psychiatrist on the faculty of the graduate school in Boston’s prestigious Simmons College—the implications were clear. Teachers needed to listen more; students needed to feel confident in sharing their questions and ideas in a non-judgmental, non-antagonistic environment; classrooms themselves had to be revisited to create a more egalitarian teaching space, moving from rigid rows to inviting and inclusive circles; indeed, education itself needed to be re-conceptualized into a collaborative endeavor, more like a business network in which like-minded, if not like-talented, people—as opposed to a teacher and students—who worked to both learn and grow together, emotionally and intellectually. As Murphy and colleagues argue (2012), relational learning at its core elevates rather than dismisses the pivotal role of emotions and the importance of doubt and questioning in the development of lifelong learning habits. Students and teachers come to understand and benefit from the inquiries and perspectives of those with different backgrounds (Saito & Atenciop, 2014).

Applications

Relational learning, although most successfully applied during the formative years of a child’s educational growth, has been used by teachers to guide classroom operations all the up to the graduate school level. Because the system places extraordinary responsibilities on students and presumes a level of maturity as well, the concept is best applied within an entire school district or university system. Students who move from a traditional classroom to a relational learning classroom can be confused and even frustrated as certain behaviors—chatting, questioning, bringing personal experiences and observations into the discussion, indeed discussion itself—while encouraged in one, are penalized in the other.

A relational learning classroom encourages reformation of desk arrangements—students can be seated or stay at their desks but the formations tend more to circles, encouraging a leveling of the educational platform, with the teacher either sitting in the middle or sitting in the circle itself. The teacher most often dispenses with high tech classroom apps—screens, for example, that tend to depress rather than encourage active learning—in favor of discussion.

The teacher introduces a topic, for example, arithmetic or poetry. Students are encouraged to respond to the topic, sharing their understanding based on experiences, past classes, or an assigned text book chapter and raising questions. The teacher may approach students’ input in small groups or even one on one. The teacher never entirely abdicates control, of course, but rather steers the conversation into profitable areas, using the students and their observations to direct the class.

The classroom is still a classroom—students will be expected to respond either in writing or in presentations or in timed oral assessments to demonstrate a level of competence and a mastery of material. In relational learning, however, even traditionally intimidating experiences such as writing papers or taking exams can be redirected into work done in pairs or in small groups, students learning even then from each other. The dynamic creates, at least theoretically, a more energetic classroom. The children are far more willing to pay attention and contribute and the teacher can feed off that energy and in turn bring a level of enthusiasm that helps create less a classroom and more a community, a circle of energy. Relational learning also posits that students need to be given time apart. Reflection, even day dreaming, is seen as a way to allow the mind to grow and expand its perceptions. Individual work on specific assignments allows students to assess their own progress.

Relational learning is transformational for teachers as well (McNamee & Moscheta, 2015). Although to those unaware of the system, relational learning in its application might appear chaotic and noisy and certainly unpredictable, the dynamic is both nuanced and complex. The dynamic encourages long-term commitment to education as each day the student grows in confidence and comes to look forward to an environment where both their questions and their ideas are welcomed. The teacher can minimize the oppressive occupational hazard of burn-out as each day, indeed each class in a typical teaching day, promises something new and stimulating (Oweis, 2014).

More progressive schools encourage or mandate that teachers work in pairs, often across grade levels or across disciplines as a way to foster their own growth, encouraging their own questioning of their classroom presentation. By observing how colleagues conduct a class, jointly creating homework, conducting in-class interactive exercises, and sharing the creation and assessment of examinations and papers, teachers can help each other, professional to profession, to foster and maintain their own learning. No longer must a teacher seek to be the single great authority figure, which can lead to troubling professional paranoia in which teachers simply cannot permit any limits to their authority or questioning of their practices. Teachers are more flexible, students more relaxed, the classroom more energized. Students and teachers both can develop socially as well as intellectually, working on both communication and listening skills. Students as they move through their education come to rely less on authority figures telling them what to do and how to do it and more on their own initiative, trusting their own observations and drawing their own conclusions. Relation learning cultivates creative innovation, which is in turn the basic and most fundamental working model for any successful business. Under the model, education produces theoretically not passively receptive students but rather creative, confident, curious, engaged, enthusiastic, and socially aware adults Konrad (2010).

Viewpoints

In practice, relational learning can be seen and has been criticized by educators, administrators, and by parents, as encouraging a most disquieting kind of anarchy, deliberately sabotaging the traditional discipline and seriousness of the classroom. Students can league together and usurp the authority of a teacher who does not have sufficient ability to control the classroom. Among school children, there is a fine line between enthusiasm and chaos. Many critics of relational learning assert that students by definition lack the maturity and knowledge base to take charge of their own education. The traditional big desk/little desks room arrangement and lecture format contribute to establishing the order necessary to conduct a full calendar of lesson plans and meet established benchmarks. Further, if the relational learning system is not applied across the board in a school or school system, students and parents may be confused by mixed signals and conflicting pedagogies.

Relational learning can be mistaken for teacher abdication. A teacher who encourages self-direction and lively discussion may be mistakenly faulted as lacking the discipline and hard-core commitment to outlining each class, setting up clear objectives in a written lesson plan, and then rigorously maintaining that transmission of knowledge in packets that can be assessed by standardized instruments. Student performance on standardized tests, however, are important for school funding, prestige, and enrollment.

Because students are for the most part evolving toward maturity, they do not always perceive the implications of the freedoms and responsibilities implicit in peer-level education. Without clear direction from the teacher, active students can mistake self-direction for license to conduct themselves in unrestricted ways and deconstructing the classroom into recess. Without a clear and identifiable hierarchy of authority and clearly defined roles, a classroom can quickly devolve into the chaos scenario critics find inherent in relational learning. Even within a single classroom, critics argue, a single unruly student can in the disrupt the entire relational learning process.

Many parents and educators argue that an authoritarian teaching style is the most efficient model for stilling fidgety young bodies long enough to educate their minds. The teacher is expected to be a model of authority and the classroom a practice stage for the control and self-discipline required of students for their future lives as productive workers. Critics counter that in a post-industrial, digitally driven world, that system produces workers that are best suited to the workplace model corporate America is moving away from. The passive students graduate to a lifelong workers who are terrified of originality, deeply distrustful of their own capabilities, hungering for approval, and paranoid of others within the same network. By sharing the education process and emphasizing the strengths found in others, relational learning places community above autonomy and places the self within a cooperative context, which can encourage a lifetime of learning and teaching.

Terms & Concepts

Anthropology: The study of cultures and civilizations in comparison with others.

Autonomy: The condition of the self alone and empowered to make decisions and choices without interference or input of others.

Burnout: Workplace slang for an employee, most often long-term, who grows tired and frustrated over repeating the same tasks without evident result. Burned out employees become unproductive and may seek employment elsewhere or experience a breakdown in health.

Collaborative Learning: The strategy to open up a classroom to encouraging students to assist each other in working through the implications of new material.

Dynamic: A relationship defined by an even-handed and consistent give and take. In a dynamic relationship, one person does not do all the work.

Egalitarian: Specifically relating to the idea that each person within a collective is significant and should have an appropriate say in decisions and actions.

Paradigm: A conceptual model.

Passive Learning: The classroom operation that maintains teacher authority as key and works by exposing students to new information without the expectation of response or application.

Bibliography

Konrad, S. (2010). Relational learning in social work education: Transformative education for teaching a course in loss, grief and death. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 30(1), 15–28.

Dyke, M. (2015). Reconceptualising learning as a form of relational reflexivity. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36(4), 542–557. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=102602452&site=ehost-live

McNamee, S., & Moscheta, M. (2015). Relational intelligence and collaborative learning. New Directions for Teaching & Learning, 2015(143), 25–40. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=109308818&site=ehost-live

Murphy, M., & Brown, T. (2012). Learning as relational: Intersubjectivity and pedagogy in higher education. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 31(5), 643–654.

Oweis, A. (2014). The missing link in professional learning: Sustained relational support. Christian Teachers Journal, 22(1), 24–27. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=94749941&site=ehost-live

Saito, E., & Atencio, E. (2014). Group learning as relational economic activity. Educational Review, 66(1), 96–107. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=93594966&site=ehost-live

Schettino, C. C. (2016). A framework for problem-based learning: Teaching mathematics with a relational problem-based pedagogy. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 10(2), 42–67. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118839087&site=ehost-live

Smyth, J. J., McInerney, P., & Fish, T. (2013). Blurring the boundaries: From relational learning towards a critical pedagogy of engagement for disengaged disadvantaged young people. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 21(2), 299–320. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=88786207&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Chuderski, A. A. (2016). Time pressure prevents relational learning. Learning & Individual Differences, 49, 361–365. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=117059690&site=ehost-live

Frasconi, P. P., Costa, F. C., De Raedt, L. L., & De Grave, K. K. (2014). kLog: A language for logical and relational learning with kernels. Artificial Intelligence, 217, 117–143. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99061216&site=ehost-live

Plevin, R. (2016). Take control of the noisy classroom: From chaos to calm in 15 seconds. New York, NY: Crown.

Smith, D., & Fisher, A. (2015). Better than carrots or sticks: Restorative practices for positive classroom management. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.