Building, Maintaining, and Repairing Classroom Relationships : This Room of Earth and Sky

Now more than ever, students need support. To meet their needs, educators should encourage their students to break from the mainstream by inspecting their experiences, and therefore expressing their own values. This endeavor will lead students to make choices that are best for themselves and others. It is important to support students in both relating and connecting to society, and to have hope and joy for meeting the day full on.

Educators need to give their students the opportunity to reveal their life histories, experiences, perspectives, and expectations in ways that are themed with the educators' class curriculums. Doing so will naturally build inter-subjectivity. Increased inter-subjectivity leads to meaningful relationships and higher achievement. In turn, this will lead to stronger social relatedness and connectedness.

The purpose of Building, Maintaining, and Repairing Classroom Relationships is simple: to quickly build classroom relationships in a metaphorical, colorful, and creative way. This can be accomplished by theming curriculum with phenomenology, experience, and values clarification (PEVC) strategies. This book is set up in a concrete, sequential, and linear fashion, and is designed to meet the needs of a variety of educators and leaders. It is arranged to be browsed for quick reference for teachers who are busy and need relationship building strategies, fast.

Jerry Worley is a professor in the Education Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. Originally from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana, Dr. Worley has written over a dozen articles and books on social justice and the human experience.

Logan Roshell is a social studies and English teacher at Elk Mound High School in Elk Mound, Wisconsin. Former winner of the Elmer Winter’s Award for social studies, he is also the co-author of Low Hanging Fruit: Ripe Pickings for the Deep Tracks of Social Education.