Re: emotional bonds/education

Robert Bahruth (rbahruth who-is-at claven.idbsu.edu)
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 11:13:16 +0100

Dear Mike, Leslie Cohen at Northwest Regional Lab wrote a fine piece on
predictors of school success (in ERIC circa 1983), which identified "system
fairness, emotional relationships between teachers and students, and many
other factors identified in schools where students were performing well. I
also think John Schumann's work on the Acculturation Model in Applied
Lingistics was seminal in beginning to contemplate the affective domain of
learners in the teaching process. Of course, Freire all along has made a
strong argument for building teacher-learner bonds through his "pedagogy of
question" geared toward using the learners' cultures as a springboard to
critcal thinking and critical literacy. Another recent text is "Building
Communities of Learners" by Sudia Paloma McCaleb (1994 St Martin's Press)
which is a qualitative report of a successful intervention anchored in
Freire's ideas. Much of my own work centers on Freire's pedagogy, the most
widely diseminated is a book co-authored with Curt Hayes & Carolyn Kessler
entitled Literacy Con Carino meaning Literacy with tender loving care. It
reports a successful turn-around of 22 Mexican-American students in Texas
via a radical, culturally and developmentally appropriate pedagogy coupled
with humanization and democratization of the classroom (Heinemann 1991).
Classics are Teacher by Sylvia Ashton Warner 1961, and Kohl's 36 Children.

Hope this helps, roberto