Here and back again : relational pedagogy in informal and environmental education

Many informal education programs emphasize the transformative aspects of their experiences. This transformation-by-design approach is seen in multiple types of informal education, including long-term after-school tutoring programs and short-term residential nature education programs. By participating in such programs, youth have opportunities to gain new perspectives, horizons, and self-concepts that may promote academic, social, and personal thriving. However, focusing too much on the transformational aspects of informal education experiences may have unintended effects. Framing such experiences as rare, extra-ordinary, or uniquely special may affect students' perceptions of how relevant and welcoming such settings are for them. This may be especially the case for youth who have been marginalized in academic or nature education settings, or who otherwise face barriers to participation. To avoid these unintended inequities, it is important for informal education programs to account for the ways that pedagogy can help make learning experiences relevant to students and their homes, schools, and communities. In this three-paper dissertation, I use a theoretical framework of Relational Pedagogy to explore the theoretical and practical implications of explicitly orienting informal educational goals toward students' present and future engagements with their homes, schools, and communities (Bingham \& Sidorkin, 2004). In connecting ethical questions of care in education with the implications of unequal power and imperfect communication inherent in social relations, relational pedagogy takes Noddings' foundational ideas of the primacy of educational care (1988) and brings them into conversation with the cultural humility encouraged by Levinas' conceptions of alterity (1974) and Freire's emancipatory goals and non-negotiable praxis of dialogue (1972). As such, relational pedagogy can guide practitioners toward cultivating cultural humility from a self-aware positionality, rather than attempt to gain "enough" cultural competence to reach particular students. Through this framework and a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies of two informal education settings, I argue that for informal education programs—particularly those that emphasize transformative experiences—effectively enacting culturally sustaining pedagogies means de-centering the places in which such experiences occur and re-centering the future interactions and communities to which the students will return. Paper One uses two years of survey data collected from tutors and students at an after-school tutoring program to explore the degree to which social perspective taking, conceptualized in this context as an active, operationalized component of relational pedagogy, might influence the perceptions and efficacy of tutors-student relationships (Gehlbach, Brinkworth, & Harris, 2012). The results of the study suggested that the degree to which tutors believed they could and normally did take the perspectives of their students positively predicted their end-of-year perceived self-efficacy and their students' perceptions of tutor perspective taking. Neither tutor nor student ratings of tutor perspective taking, however, predicted students' ratings of tutor efficacy or overall program efficacy. Papers Two and Three then apply the concept of relational pedagogy to examine instructor practices in a residential nature education program explicitly dedicated to serving marginalized youth. In this program, K-12 classroom teachers and other chaperones accompany youth in a multi-day, overnight experience led by a team of nature education instructors. Paper Two quantitatively explored the connections between instructors' pedagogical practices and teacher ratings of instructor and program efficacy based on four years of survey data (n = 240). The study also explored one-month follow-up surveys of classroom teachers' perceptions of overall program quality and of students' enjoyment, learning, and environmental affinity. The findings suggest that classroom teachers' perceptions of nature education instructors' practices were indeed related to teachers' short- and long-term perceptions of program efficacy and increases in environmental affinity. A mediation analysis of the relevant variables suggests that instructors' practices, including those related to understanding and caring for students (a proxy for relational pedagogy in this context), did influence how teachers perceived long-term benefits a month later, but mostly to the extent that the teachers saw the program as beneficial on the last day of their participation. Paper Three provides a parallel qualitative exploration of the same nature education program, investigating instructor beliefs and practices around relational pedagogy through program observations and instructor interviews. Drawing from these instances of instructor practices and reflections, I explore the different ways in which instructors navigate the dichotomies presented by a nature education program intended to serve marginalized youth. Themes emerging included uncertainty in responses to student behavior, sensitivity to classroom contexts and relationships, and the transformative potential of focusing on home contexts and relations when in an explicitly "nature-focused" setting. From this exploration I propose that, for everyone seeking to bridge experiential differences, and particularly for white instructors teaching across racial, ethnic, and linguistic differences, enacting relational care and trust depend on consciously practicing cultural humility and on re-centering future-oriented conceptions of "home" as key programmatic and pedagogical goals. Together, these papers offer a theoretically-driven exploration of pedagogical practices in informal education, and specifically highlight how the concepts of perspective taking, relational care, and culturally sustaining pedagogy can take on new meanings when they are enacted in places or circumstances that differ from students' everyday schooling experiences

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Ardoin Nicole M. (Nicole Michele) 
Padilla Amado M.
Martínez Ramón