No Education Without Relation: Foreword by Nel Noddings (Counterpoints)

This book is a collective statement about a new approach to education – the pedagogy of relation. After revisiting a number of existing conversations, the authors bring together several theoretical traditions under the umbrella of the pedagogy of relation. This book is an appeal to develop a common frame of reference for educational approaches based on the primacy of relations in education. The authors try to understand human relations rather than educational processes, behaviors, methods, curriculum, etc. The authors also examine the dangers that a pedagogy of relations may present, and the implications such a pedagogy may have for curriculum and educational policy. The promise of the pedagogy of relation is to offer a viable alternative to dominating trends in educational thinking – trends that emphasize control over teacher and student behavior as the main way of achieving excellence.

The Editors: Charles Bingham is Assistant Professor of Curriculum Theory at the Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He was a public school teacher for thirteen years in South Africa and the United States, and received a doctoral degree in philosophy of education from the University of Washington. He is the author of Schools of Recognition: Identity Politics and Classroom Practices (2001) as well as a number of articles on recognition, authority, and self-fashioning.
Alexander M. Sidorkin is Assistant Professor of Education at the Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He received doctoral degrees in education from the Institute for Theory and History of Education in Russia and the University of Washington. He is the author of Beyond Discourse: Education, the Self, and Dialogue (1999) and Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil (Peter Lang, 2002).