Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the aspects of how children’s voices and teacher’s voices are relative to each other when it comes to responsibility, patience, and kindness and how they impact the teacher student relationships for children in poverty in a classroom setting. The issue is that living below the poverty threshold has major effects on the development of children.“Poverty is strongly associated with a number of risk factors implicated in poor developmental outcomes in behavioral studies, such as unsupportive parenting, poor nutrition and education, lack of caregiver education, and high levels of traumatic and stressful life events, making the income to needs ratio a good proxy for cumulative developmental stress (Luby, Belden, Botteron, Marrus, Harms, Babb, Nishino,Barch, 2014). I took four main categories to focus on. The first focus of this study is what qualities do teachers possess that influence and inspire students that struggle from poverty. The second is how do schools help students that live in economically disadvantaged areas and what are the specific policies that guide them in a better direction. The third focus is how children living in these economically disadvantaged areas struggle with the social aspect of school such as bullying. My final focus point is how living in poverty leads to students having behavioural issues and poor developmental growth. These four main points I have gathered are going to go deeper into how a child’s education is truly affected by poverty. I used qualitative research to conduct my study. I did an interview that was inspiring and showed how bringing positivity into poverty can go a long way.