Nelson, J. D. (2016). Relational teaching with black boys: Strategies for learning at a single-sex middle school for boys of color. Teachers College Record, <\/i>118<\/i>(6), 1.<\/p>\n
Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for Black boys’ learning across single-sex and coeducational environments. Limited attention to these relationships by school professionals is rooted in deficit-oriented conceptions of boyhood and Black masculinity. The popular message of deficiency and pathology is clear: Black boys and men are either dangerous or at-risk and need to be saved. Such narrow conceptions are destructive, operate unconsciously, skew teachers’ perceptions of who boys are, and distort teachers’ efforts to meet boys’ distinct learning needs. A “boy crisis” in U.S. education has been characterized by a set of distressing school outcomes in specific learning categories. Racial marginalization and poverty only serve to exacerbate these negative academic outcomes, whereby low-income Black boys remain in the bottom quartile across all achievement measures. Scholars have recently begun to partly attribute boys’ underachievement to a lack of emphasis on the relational dimension of schools. (1) Illustrate how a set of relational teaching strategies supported Black boys’ engagement and learning, and (2) further contribute boys’ “voice” to a counternarrative, which strives to complicate and dispel negative race and gender stereotypes associated with Black males in the United States. This study employs a relational teaching framework to examine the learning relationships among teachers and a full cohort of eighth-grade Black boys (N = 27) at a single-sex middle school for boys of color in New York City. In-depth interviews from a critical ethnography conducted at the school-site (2011-2012) culled boys’ narratives of their teacher-student relationships. Boys particularly expressed how teachers must foremost convey mastery of course content, with a lucid set of humane behavioral expectations. Narratives from the boys revealed how relationally effective teachers consistently enacted the following gestures: reaching out and go beyond; personal advocacy; establishing common ground; and accommodating opposition. Teachers demonstrated the capacity to acquire and refine relational gestures, but relationship struggles among the boys and their teachers were commonplace. Core findings include: (a) Boys illuminated how specific aspects of the school context facilitated successful enactment of the relational teaching strategies by teachers; (b) teachers’ use of the relational strategies was also facilitated by the social categories of race, gender, and class the boys embodied; (c) boys’ engagement and learning benefitted from positive teacher-student relationships, which ensued after effective use of the relational teaching strategies; and (d) relational teaching with Black boys is not limited to either single-sex or coeducational learning environments.<\/p>\n
Access to full article can be found here:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/eric.ed.gov\/?id=EJ1100401<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nelson, J. D. (2016). Relational teaching with black boys: Strategies for learning at a single-sex middle school for boys of color. Teachers College Record, 118(6), 1. Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for Black boys’ learning across single-sex and coeducational environments. Limited attention to these relationships by school professionals is rooted… read more<\/span> <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[93,68,181],"tags":[1608,229,1781,433],"class_list":{"0":"post-1906","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-masculinity-studies-ms","7":"category-race-education-re","8":"category-teaching-t","9":"tag-1608","10":"tag-black-boys","11":"tag-joseph-nelson","12":"tag-relationships","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/225"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.edb.utexas.edu\/bmerc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}