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“You’re Trying to Know Me”: Students from Nondominant Groups Respond to Teacher Personalism

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Abstract

Urban school districts have increasingly enacted policies of personalism, such as converting large schools into smaller schools. Such policies ask teachers to develop supportive, individual relationships with students as a presumed lever for student achievement. Research on student–teacher relationships generally supports policies of personalism. Much of this literature also considers these relationships’ sociocultural dimensions, and so leads to questions about how low-income youth and youth of color might respond to teacher efforts to develop closer relationships with them. This qualitative study, conducted over 1 year with 34 youth at 3 small, urban high schools, explores how youth from nondominant groups responded to teacher personalism. Data show that teacher practices consistent with culturally-responsive pedagogy and relational trust literature do promote student–teacher relationships. However, tensions arose when participants perceived that teacher personalism threatened their privacy or agency. Sociocultural and institutional contexts contributed to these tensions, as participants navigated personalism amidst experiences that constrained their trust in schools. A staged model of student–teacher relationships integrates these findings and extends current thinking about culturally-responsive personalism. These findings inform implications for teacher practice and policies of personalism.

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Notes

  1. Understanding that all teachers and students have relationships of some kind with one another, I use the term personalism to describe a particular kind of student–teacher relationships as succinctly defined by Bryk et al. (2010).

  2. I use the term nondominant groups as Lee (2009) does, to describe both youth of color and low-income youth, and to emphasize their “political positioning” (p. 88) in American society.

  3. All student names are pseudonyms.

  4. Six participants had either left their schools or were absent during the days when I conducted final interviews, and could not be reached by phone.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part by the Spencer Foundation’s Research Training Grant and Dissertation Grant. The author wishes to thank the following individuals for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript: Robert Ream, James Spillane, Jennifer Jennings, Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, René Antrop-González, Leanne Kallemeyn, Bridget Kelly, Ann Marie Ryan and Anita Thomas. The author is also grateful to The Urban Review’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.

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  1. Department of Cultural and Educational Policy Studies, School of Education, Loyola University Chicago, 820 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1100, Chicago, IL, 60611, USA

    Kate Phillippo

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Phillippo, K. “You’re Trying to Know Me”: Students from Nondominant Groups Respond to Teacher Personalism. Urban Rev 44, 441–467 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-011-0195-9

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