The Humanizing Pedagogy

When I decided that I wanted to be a teacher, I was in seventh grade. I had one of the best math teachers I've ever had, and it was evident to me that she wanted to make time to be personable with her students. She wanted her students to know that she had a life outside of just being a teacher and that she cared about us so much that she wanted to share those moments of her life with us as well. I still remember her telling us one day about playing Rock Band in her basement with her husband and how she had accomplished 'expert' level on the drums. Although this memory is seemingly unimportant, it's those small personal stories and gestures that made me realize that she wasn't there just to be an authority figure at school; this teacher really cared about forming relationships with her students, and I know for a fact that she's still going on strong with her new students every year.


This idea of humanizing oneself as a teacher is one that we've not talked about much in this class, but we have talked about the idea of humanizing our students. Just as we, as teachers, want our students to feel comfortable around us and to be able to recognize us as real people, we too need to recognize that our students have lives outside of school. In the final chapter of the book, Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In, the author talks about the importance of acknowledging the humanity of both students and teachers. A friend of mine put it this way; students are not going to care about how much you know until you show that you care about them.


Relationships are such a big part of being a teacher and one of the biggest reasons I chose to pursue this career, and it amazes me how many teachers seem to forget this aspect. In my current placement I have worked hard to engage my students in non-academic conversation and joke around with them to make them feel comfortable. I have tried to form lesson ideas around things that I discovered they enjoy, and I have asked them for feedback about the types of activities I am implementing in class. The responses I have gotten have been positive and I can only imagine how the dynamic of these classrooms might be different if the focus was on this relational aspect all the time. In the Motivated book mentioned above the author writes, "Teachers are problem solvers who monitor the classroom climate, attend to the relationships and interactions among participants as activities unfold, identify what is working and diagnose what is not, and then draw on a rich repertoire of practices to tinker and adjust". What a better community we could create if this was the role teachers took.