WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

It is widely recognized that teacher-student relationships are important to student motivation (Birch & Ladd, 1996; Davis, 2003; Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006; Noddings, 1992), intellectual development (Goldstein, 1999) and academic achievement (Muller, Katz, & Dance, 1999; Nieto, 1996). Relationships help create and sustain positive classroom learning environments that are critical to students’ sense of efficacy, agency, and belonging (Day et al., 2006; Lomax, 2007), and when student-teacher relationships are effective, they may support the types of rich classroom conversations that “hold the interest and imagination of young people” (Carr, 2005, p. 265). As some have noted, “learning doesn’t happen without relationships” (Alber, 2017). 

Despite strong agreement that positive relationships  are important, the field does not provide much guidance for teachers about how to conduct them with students. Very little research has inquired into how caring relationships between students and teachers are created and maintained (Adler, 2002; Gomez et al., 2004) and even less into the unique needs that may frame the work of teachers who work with traumatized youth. Unlike mental health professionals, who get extensive training in how to maintain well-bounded relationships with those in their care, teachers are largely on their own to decide how to enact relationships with their students (Gomez et al., 2004). 

Teachers may suffer when the emotional demands on them are too high. When supporting students through crises, educators may suffer from secondary traumatic stress (Hydon, et al., 2015).  Fatigue and frustration are common among teachers, and may often stem from the emotional investment of oneself that comes with the work (Hargreaves, 2000, 2001; Sutton, 2004). In the absence of other guidance about how to conduct relationships, teachers may need to create their own boundaries to help them limit their emotional involvement with students (Hargreaves, 2001). 

The lack of clear guidance on this issue is particularly stark given new recognition of the need to establish trauma-informed conditions in the classroom and the unique complexities faced by educators who work with youth who have experienced trauma. It is understood that trauma often disrupts healthy attachment, especially in children, and that traumatized youth may “bond too easily with anyone who shows a passing interest in them” (Craig, 2017, p.59). Traumatized youth “need the adults in their lives to model and teach how to be in relationship with peers and adults,” and when relationships are inconsistent or harmful, it may result in the internalization of “unhealthy confused or risky beliefs about who to trust” (Venet, 2019, p.1).

We tend to assume that teachers are care-givers and students are care-seekers, but students may have relational power over teachers that invokes “a unique form of attachment dependence…in some teachers” (Riley, 2008, p.1). This may make boundary-setting difficult for those teachers whose professional identity rests, at least in part, on their positive relationships with students.