2026 Theses Doctoral

How Beautiful It Is to be This Way With You: Articulating Pedagogy Through the Lens of Relational Aesthetics

Piede, Samantha E.

This study sheds light on teachers’ classroom practice and aims to provide a language for the ways that their pedagogy affords, obliges, impedes, and prohibits certain relational dynamics within classrooms in ways that current discourse in teacher education has yet to fully articulate. I use Nicolas Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics to develop a conceptual framework that allows us to articulate how a teacher’s pedagogical moves open space for certain relational encounters between students and subject matter, students and class, and students and one another.

These ways of being together can be evaluated aesthetically – in terms of whether the relations brought on are convivial, agonistic, harmonious, discordant, and otherwise. I hold that many aesthetically-sensitive teachers already attend to these dimensions in making pedagogical choices, both in their initial planning and on-the-fly decision-making. Articulating pedagogy in this way allows us to understand seemingly small adjustments – actions as simple as switching the order of questions on a discussion sheet or pulling a desk out an additional three inches from the wall – as robust relational interventions that shuffle the relationscape and bring forward new ways of being together.

Drawing on testimony from relational artists and critics, actor-network theorists, and classroom teachers, I argue that, by attending to and naming these dimensions, we dignify the expertise of these teachers, many of whom have honed these skills largely in private due to a lack of explicit language with which to describe and communicate with others about their craft. Further, by naming the relational potentials of pedagogical moves, we can create opportunities for developing this sort of sensitivity by helping teachers see the connections between pedagogy and the quality of relations that emerge in their classroom, as well as to understand the cues to which they can attend in order to gauge the aesthetic qualities of emerging relations.