Personal Presence and the Safe Class

Abstract

Martin Buber decried the preponderance of I-it relationships, believing that they threatened human well-being. Thingification was the culprit. As we move further a field from everyday person-to-person experience, the special connection involving attentiveness, shared rapport, and synchronized verbal and nonverbal communication—in other words, relationship needs to be pursued and reclaimed. At the same time, drawing upon the work of D. W. Winnicott, creating and maintaining an environment for learning, by serving as a container for the anxiety associated with seeking new and unfamiliar knowledge, is a teacher’s vital role. There is a profound and pervasive relational dimension to teaching, especially teaching in the professions. The relationship is a unique and special one with identifiable similarities to the practitioner-client relationship. Both are based on the dynamics of human development and change. The mantle of professional authority derives partly from the intellectual, but more substantially through the immediacy, openness, and intimacy between you and students. The central passageway for you to help students learn the ground rules for practice—how to establish and sustain a relationship, to attend to another person, to pace interventions, to converse, to tune into others and, most important, how to manage their own feelings while engaged with others—lies in your intense connection with students. The optimum pattern in practice as well as in teaching is having a balanced brain, one with strengths in both empathy and in substantive know-how. This balance is achieved through relationship. Students bring with them habits and beliefs that previously worked for them but are not professionally functional. The foundation of competence does not arise from amassing new theories and factual knowledge but, rather, from absorbing and synthesizing them into a new, improved, and integrated whole established through your firsthand contact. To develop students’ level of professional expertise, you need to interact in a manner consistent with what theory and research you preach. The relationship is the medium, a potent emotional channel, through which depth learning occurs and professional identity is formulated. Your relationship with students serves as an exemplar for the student-client relationship outside the classroom.