Chapter 16: Relational Teaching During a Pandemic: A Conversation Across Theories in Practice

What follows is a discussion between us, three women who meet weekly in a virtual writing group. Kim and Alicia are both part of teacher preparation programs. Kim teaches literacy courses for elementary education masters’ students and Alicia teaches science and math secondary education courses for undergraduate students. Ebtissam teaches Arabic language and literature to undergraduate and graduate students. Amidst the turbulence of the pandemic, we found ourselves reflecting on relationality in our teaching practices and lives. During three separate writing meetings, when this occurred, we paused to record our conversations. For this chapter, we compiled the particularly salient pieces into one dialogue. Because we are intimately familiar with each other’s work we did not often explicitly reference scholars. Therefore, to authentically capture the conversation, we added references and section headings beside the dialogue rather than embedded in the text.