2025 Theses Doctoral

Navigating the Relational Work and Emotional Labor of Relationship Building in Teaching: Forming Teacher-Student Relationships in the Context of Perceived Challenging Student Behaviors

Dressner, Madeline

Teachers engage in relational and emotional work as they develop relationships with their students, forming teacher-student dyads that impact the lives and experiences of both the teacher and student. Within their schooling contexts, some teachers become known for their ability to build teacher-student relationships, particularly with students who demonstrate behavior that may be challenging or deviate from the explicit and/or implicit socially accepted norms of formal schooling – students who are formally or informally labeled as demonstrating misbehavior. The purpose of this research was to explore the professional experiences, knowledge, and skills of these teachers – who consistently build relationships with students whose behaviors may be described as challenging by others – with particular emphasis on the approaches the teachers enacted in building relationships with students, what experiences informed their approaches, and how these teachers navigated the emotional labor of teaching and being in relationship with their students. Utilizing a qualitative practitioner inquiry-based research approach, participants were 13 inservice elementary educators teaching in the United States, whose classrooms ranged from first grade through fourth grade (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Extant research within the field of student misbehavior is difficult to locate, frequently lacks the perspective of the student or the teacher, and adopts a behavioral stance with the goal of attributing the source of the misbehavior. In addition, while research studies illuminate the ways relational approaches are beneficial, this relational approach has not yet been applied to the area of student misbehavior or to identify specific professional skills, knowledge, and experiences that inform how educators who consistently build relationships with these students approach their work, how they learned these skills, and how they think about and navigate the emotionality embedded in their work.

Using data from multiple sources (semi-structured interviews, focus groups, ongoing anecdotal exchanges, fieldnotes, and reflective journals) and analyzing a collective 222 years of teaching experience, the study demonstrates how teachers who enact relational approaches when fostering teacher-student relationships adopt the stance of researchers of the lives and stories of children. In these teacher-student relational dyads, teachers described their emotional experiences and the emotional labor of the teaching profession, including the systemic challenges that impeded their relational work. Teachers in the study used strategies to navigate their emotional labor, and these strategies were often developed from their early life experiences, observing other educators, experiential learning in the field, and practicing self-reflection. In particular, teachers negotiated the profession's emotional demands through emotional and relational modeling, or what emotional labor theory poses as surface and deep acting (Hochschild, 2012). The enactment and use of relational and emotional modeling ultimately enabled teachers to be authentically engaged as researchers of the lives and stories of children, forming teacher-student dyads with students whose behaviors were perceived as challenging.

The research findings have significant implications for preservice teacher education and inservice teacher professional development, particularly in supporting teachers as they develop teacher-student relationships and navigate the emotional labor of teaching through relational and emotional modeling.