Humanising Classrooms: Restorative and Relational Practices in Teacher Education

All educational spaces have the potential to be relational, humanising, and transformative. Equally, they have the potential to be isolating, de-humanising and disempowering spaces. Teacher education occupies a unique space within higher education; within this space, pre-service teachers are simultaneously fully (university) students and fully (becoming) teachers. Embodying these dual roles creates the opportunity for pre-service teachers to reflect, critically and compassionately, on educational relationships, identities, and practices. Yet, the reality is often very different; In some countries, including Australia where this study took place, teacher education has become increasingly focused on meeting external standards of professionalism rather than being places for students to take risks, discover their own teacher identity and develop their teaching craft. Set within a system that upholds consistency and standards, there is a danger that teacher education classes can be drained of critique, creativity and compassion. This research reports on a set of two Australian teacher education courses – grounded in restorative and relational pedagogy – that sought to humanise the university classroom. The data comes from the experiences of two of the educators in these units over two iterations of offerings, as well as students from both courses and both years. The first part of this study is a Collaborative Autoethnography which usually involves two or more researchers joining to ‘interact dialogically’ to interpret collective narrative data. For the second part of this study, focused on the experiences of the students, data came from a combination of informal mid-semester and formal end-of-semester feedback forms, collected by the university as part of the Evaluation of Teaching and Units (SETU). To analyse the data, we collaboratively examined the data, applying the principles of Self-Determination Theory as a guiding lens. Through thematic analysis process, codes were created and cross checked to achieve a high inter-rater reliability. We discuss the experiences of the educators involved in designing, leading and teaching within the courses and utilise Ryan and Deci’s Self Determination theory to analyse student feedback and assess the impact of the courses. Through humanising practices, the courses assist pre-service teachers in navigating their individual needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and empower them to establish meaningful connections with peers and teachers as they co-create learning and teaching experiences. The relational, restorative pedagogy helps to shape their perceptions of future teaching.

Key words: Relational Pedagogy, Restorative Justice Education, Self Determination Theory, Humanising Education, Teacher Education