Whole-school relational pedagogy: establishing the climate for effective student engagement

Abstract

Relational pedagogies attend to considerations of emplacement and context by asking how education might most effectively motivate rich forms of pedagogical encounter in light of student and teacher positionality. However, missing from the scholarly literature are substantive accounts of the ways relational pedagogies inform school renewal initiatives. Using experiences gleaned from a school-wide renewal initiative enacted in a secondary school in Queensland, Australia, this paper explores how the convictions and practice of teachers aligned with a renewal agenda that was designed to reconceptualise teaching and learning under a ‘relational’ lens. This paper reports that the conditions within a school prescribe how relationality (as both concept and practice) mandate particular practice frameworks, which in turn influence the ways that students and teachers experience teaching and learning. The analysis outlined in this paper finds that relational pedagogical approaches that are not supported by commensurate school policy enactments risk becoming redundant, overlooked, or altogether proscribed when attempts towards relationality are translated into practice.