The Socratic Guide on My Side

In this essay, the author argues that no person can just step into self-directed learning without a mentor who guides students into learning. Learning is an unending relational process, based on trust, that begins in wonder. The chapter examines arguments from Plato, Polanyi, Pieper, and others who contend that learning is other-centered rather than self-directed, and as such, learning demands the need for guides—either as individuals, books, or sets of “guiding questions” that push us to grasp a larger, systemic view of the world.

Toward a Process-Centered Account of Literate Activity in the Classroom

This paper presents an approach to conceptualizing classroom activities that views teachers, students, and classroom objects as participating in continuous, cyclical processes of “reengaging” and “disengaging.” As an illustration, six episodes in a U.S. preschool classroom of a teacher, nine 4- to 5-year-olds, and a box (which held objects related to a featured letter of the week) were analyzed through a relational-process lens. The box, classroom members, and objects that children brought from home moved through cycles of coming together and moving apart physically and attentionally. Furthermore, these processes metaphorically pulled in other activities across time and space.

A re-consideration of interpretation. A relational approach

This paper is a discussion paper and it seeks to re-consider the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of interpretation within the relational approach to psychoanalysis. As such, it aims to argue the Freudian approach to interpretation is rejected because it is not relational but involves only the analyst as interpreter of the patient’s experience. Instead, within the relational approach, it is suggested that if interpretation, as a process of making meaning of experiences, is re-considered as the outcome of the intersubjective relationship in which the process of making-meaning is essentially a co-creational process of the patient’s experience of the analyst in the here-and-now, interpretation can potentially be an agent of change. The clinical implication is that interpretation must be the construction of the patient’s meaning of his experience but within the relational context. A clinical verbatim transcript is documented as it illustrates this relational process in interpretation.

Educating Perfinkers: How Cognitive Tools Support Affective Engagement in Teacher Education

Our intention is to share our lived experiences as educators of educators employing Imaginative Education (IE) pedagogy. We aim to illuminate IE’s influence on our students’, and our own, affective alertness, and to leave readers feeling the possibility of this pedagogy for teaching and learning. Inspired by the literary and research praxis of métissage (Chambers et al., 2012; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009; Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2010), we offer this polyphonic text as a weaving together of our discrete and collective voices as imaginative teacher educators. Our writing reflects a relational process, one that invites us as writers and colleagues to better understand each other and our practices as IE educators (Hasebe-Ludt et al., 2009). It also allows us to share with other practitioners our struggles, questions, and triumphs as we make sense of our individual and collective praxis: how IE’s theory informs our practice, and how our practice informs our understanding of IE’s theory. This text, like IE’s philosophy, invites heterogeneous possibilities.

Comment: Socialism’s Mal(e)contents

This article reflects on how the authors in this Special Forum collectively advance the work in the subfield of critical masculinity studies. The several significant themes emerging in this collection of articles include: persistent state intervention in gender relations, the impact of longstanding patriarchal norms, the rapidly changing postwar gender equilibrium, and the continuing significance of war and martial masculinity. Furthermore, the Special Forum illuminates the importance of micro-histories and ego-documents to the study of masculinities in Central and East Europe. Finally, by framing agency as a relational process affected by a variety of constraints, these authors’ work marks a productive forward movement for the future study of critical masculinity studies more generally.

Exploring the Impact of Emotional Intelligence on Family Farm Member Conflict Experiences

Family farm sustainability traditionally focuses on economic and environmental issues. However, sustaining family farms also relies on understanding how to sustain the relationships contained therein. Emotional intelligence (EI) is an important means through which family farm members can sustain relationships, especially when handing conflict between members. This paper focused on how four EI dimensions (awareness of own emotion, management of own emotion, awareness of others’ emotions, management of others’ emotions) could prevent four types of conflict within family farms (task, relational, process, and status). Family farm participants (N = 204) were recruited through social media posts and emails to specialty agricultural groups and agencies, and students at a university. Hierarchical regression results showed that awareness of own emotions, management of own emotions, and management of others’ emotions negatively predicted task, relational, process, and status conflict. Awareness of others’ emotions did not predict any conflict types. Theoretically, this article points to the importance of considering all four EI dimensions, since they impact conflict types differently. For the family farm members, being aware of their own emotions and being able to manage emotional responses in themselves and others can help prevent conflict from occurring, thereby sustaining both family and business relationships for the future.

What is relationality? Indigenous knowledges, practices and responsibilities with kin

This paper delves into the concept of relationality and pairs academic literature with stories and lessons from Country. Bringing together majority Indigenous scholarship on relationality, the paper describes three main ideas: (1) How does a relational reality operate? (2) Relationality as a living practice and, (3) Relationality as responsibilities with kin. Many examples are provided to explain relationality in practical and concrete ways. As a trawlwulwuy woman, I weave the stories and lessons from Country throughout the paper, with a particular focus on research. I consider an inverse of relationality, extractivism, and identify how many dominant research practices are deeply extractive. The paper concludes with prompts for the reader on how research can be a more relational process. Overall, the paper demonstrates a relational ethos in (and out of) practice.

The Becoming of Change in 3D: Dialectics, Darwin, and Dewey

Dialectical development through a conflict process of affirmation, negation, and synthesis, provides a template, both for modelling organizational change, and for constructing new, synthetic conceptual models of change. This chapter highlights two other important means by which dialectics can stimulate new change models: as a relational process philosophy, and as an evolutionary theory. A selective review of the history of ideas about change, from Greek philosophy to Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, to Darwin, to pragmatism, underscores how relational process principles link several, not commonly connected, “becoming” literatures, and how these principles can stimulate key conceptual innovations. The contrast of dialectics with Darwin’s evolutionary theory uncovers several, non-obvious affinities: in underlying principles, change patterns, and mechanisms. The capacity of dialectics—as a philosophy and as an evolutionary theory—to inspire new ideas, is illustrated by a reading of Dewey’s work anew, and through other examples pertinent to contemporary phenomena.

What Does Leadership Look Like in Child and Youth Care Practice: A Course-based Qualitative Inquiry

The aim of this course-based research is to explore how child and youth care (CYC) students understand the concept of leadership within the context of CYC practice. Data was collected through online interviews and an arts-based activity. From the data analysis, four main themes were extracted: leadership as relational process, leadership as authenticity, leadership as complexity, and leadership as praxis. The findings reveal that CYC students characterize CYC leadership as a way of being relationally engaged with others that is more a way of being in the world than a matter of what one knows or does.

Can Solidarity be Taught?

In this essay I am addressing the question of whether solidarity is something that can be taught. It is based on experiences from my field research on NGOs working on education in the West African Republic of Benin and in Germany. What does it need for someone to become solidary, and what does it take to grasp the politics of solidarity? What happens to solidarity when it is instrumentalized, when solidarity campaigns are transformed into a ‘competition of care’? I understand solidarity to be first and foremost about relating to others, from a certain power position, driven by a common cause, while acknowledging the differences between those who show solidarity, and those they show it for. Solidarity as a relational process is as much about oneself as it is about the other and the relation in between. Inspired by the pedagogy of resonance and ChangeWriters methods for relationship work, I argue that as an educational practice and subject, solidarity needs to be experienced, reflected on, shared, discussed, and thus understood in its personal and political dimensions. For this to happen on a larger scale, we would not only need to let go of an instrumental vision of solidarity, but also of an instrumental vision of education.