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

Abstract

This volume offers a fresh approach to student-teacher relationships in middle childhood from the perspective of children in primary schools. It explores how children express their learning and emotional needs, as well as their experience of good and less good student-teacher relationships. Their apprehension of care and its reciprocity, of the need for time and proximity in teaching and learning, of the vicariousness of the experience, and crucially, of the place of learning in student-teacher relationships, is authentically evoked through rich verbatim quotations. Children’s accounts answer questions which teachers, parents, professionals and policy-makers ask. In the experience of children, what makes a person a teacher? What is a “good” student-teacher relationship? Can children with poor relationship histories have good relationships with new teachers? How is learning or “doing well” integral to “getting on well”?