“So we can do our best.” Care in children’s relationships with teachers [Book review]

Abstract

The title of Mary Darmanin’s book was inspired by a nine-year-old who very wisely captured the essence of education: teachers seek to do their best so that their students can do their best. Darmanin’s work sheds a poignant light upon the importance of student-teacher relationships and their centrality to education and learning. Whilst embodying scientific and theoretical rigour, the work is strikingly rooted in children’s lived experiences. Capturing the vivid and complex emotional lives of young students is truly a challenging task. However, Darmanin’s work, which is woven with conversations with nine to eleven-year-olds, achieves this succinctly. These conversations bring to light children’s immense wisdom and how, “[f]or children, the heart of the student-teacher relationship is the caring that leads to learning” (313). Darmanin aptly shows that what separates a teaching relationship from any other relationship is the aim for learning, and that learning can only occur within a secure relationship. This book is a timely example of the importance of students’ voices and that, as adults, we can learn a lot from listening to these voices. [excerpt]