Relational engagement: A multi-faceted approach to exploring and understanding global learning across a range of contexts
by Janice McMillan, Richard Kiely, Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, and Danielle Shay
Development is held in relationships[1]
Relationships are everything[2]
This essay is a reflective piece written by three educators deeply invested in and caring about learning, and in particular, about the importance of the social, the relational, and the emergent nature of this work. There are three main purposes behind our reflections. Firstly, we are focused on a social justice orientation to our work, work that reflects engagement in various ways with learning that happens across contexts and power relations, be it global community-based learning, local community engaged learning, or service-learning. Secondly, we are interested in thinking about what this means for our role as educators, a topic not often the focus in the literature on higher education – surprising, given that educators shape practices in both visible and invisible ways. Finally, we share this piece as a reflection on our own community of practice we have established over the past two years. In our work together, we have focused on relational engagement, a concept that emerged inductively in our work. In our discussions as a community of practice developed from the Knowledge Mobilization working group, linked to the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative, we began with sharing, describing, and discussing our own practices before we sought relevant theoretical resources to support our reflections. Our story is an emergent one. As adrienne maree brown (2017) has so clearly reminded us: we have to get comfortable with emergence as it is (increasingly) the new constant.
As a committed group of social justice educators wanting to work collectively, we started this project with a gaze on the personal and on practice, rather than on theory. While theory and conceptual frameworks have been helpful in illuminating and distilling aspects of our practice relevant to thinking about engagement as a relational practice, our starting point was with ourselves as educators and the educational practices we each find ourselves in - practices which are both similar and different in significant ways. Maureen has many years of experience in work around mentoring and in particular, mentoring constellations and relational mentoring (Fletcher & Ragins, 2007; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2013; Vandermaas-Peeler, 2021a, 2021b); Janice has been working in higher education community engagement framed by a pedagogy of care (Noddings, 1984; 2005), radical empathy (Jordan & Schwartz, 2018) and horizontal learning (Reeler, 2005); and Richard has been focused on framing the work he does in higher education on engaged learning with the notion of cultural humility (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998). What these practices have in common is intentionality regarding the relational aspect of engagement in teaching and learning contexts.
Importantly, relational engagement is about the shift from self to self-in-relation, in context(s). In our reflections, we also made visible the contexts, areas of interest, and experiences that we as practitioner-scholars inhabited and brought to the development of the concepts, the journey we have been on together in a community of practice and learning, and the mutual learning we have experienced. This journey in and of itself has been inherently relational and emergent, something that we have had to acknowledge and become comfortable with. And thus, we have worked at understanding each other in order to develop trust so that we can be emergent ourselves. This in and of itself has been a learning experience.
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass –
build resilience by building the relationships…less prep, more presence[3]
Following adrienne marie brown (2017) we have tried to understand what it takes to develop authentic and relational practice when our work was inherently so emergent. We had few models to follow and thus we started our collaboration with reflection on our own practices. The term relational engagement emerged in January 2021 as Janice was writing about a course she was developing. The phrase seemed to capture the essence of the work she and her colleagues at the University of Cape Town, South Africa were engaged in. From the starting point of practice, we then identified several frameworks around which we have been reading and which we came to believe provided useful lenses to flesh out the concept of relational engagement. Finally, while the concept of relational engagement has been used in business contexts[4], some religious contexts[5] and healthcare (nursing specifically)[6], we had not seen it used in higher education nor global education/learning, the field that brought us together in the first instance, through our work with the Collaborative.
In developing relational engagement as a concept, and after sharing our own practices, we worked through a range of theoretical frameworks in our engagement over a period of nearly two years, in 2021 and 2022. It was intentional and engaged work, difficult and yet relational, trying to get to know each other and our mutual values and commitments. For us, relational engagement is a critical dimension of educational practice in the current moment. On the one hand, this might seem obvious, not hard to understand. However, for us the term implies that the social dimension to educational work is put in the centre of teaching and learning practice, and of our own engagement. Putting relationships at the center of the work, renders context/s as important/central in thinking about our work. It also implies that the educator herself becomes visible in the practice as relationships imply engagement with the other. Our engagement began during COVID-19 and we all agreed that intentional relational engagement was more important than ever in this context - and has remained important as we move into the “post-COVID-19” context, where so many markers from the pandemic experience remain visible and ongoing.
The concept of relational engagement thus sits at the nexus of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational contexts. Significantly, it moves from thinking about self (student or educator) to self-in-relationships, in contexts. In this way, it implies the idea of an ecosystems approach to global learning. To make sense of the concept in these multiple domains requires us to be vigilant and critical of the lenses we use to look at and understand practice in a range of contexts. Central to this is to render power and power relations visible – who has it, where it is located, how these relations can include or exclude, intentionally or unintentionally. Linked to power is the complexity of relationship building itself which can be fraught with inherent tensions and dynamics.
This implies understanding the centrality of power in the pedagogical relationship. Returning to one of the quotes upfront in the piece, the issue of relationships and power is spelled out in a very useful way below, from the interesting CDRA, a non-profit organisation in Cape Town with whom Janice has been loosely connected for more than 20 years:
Development is held in relationships. We live, learn and develop within three
differently experienced kinds or levels of relationships: relationship with self,
interpersonal relationships with people around us and external relationships with the
rest of the world. These three levels span the inner and outer experiences of human
beings …[in addition] Power is held in relationships … without relationship power
means little, it has no force, for bad or for good. If we want to shift power, we have to
shift relationships (CDRA 2004-2005:6).
This understanding reflects the interests, experiences, and intention we brought collectively to our engagement in the community of practice. However, it is important to note that they are reflective of only a tiny fraction of the possible practices that could be framed as relational engagement. We thus began trying to map this concept through the work that we were all doing.
This took several forms as we looked at our own work and the work of each other and tried to make links and connections. It was messy and emergent but as we often reminded ourselves, so are relationships! Janice began trying to capture our initial discussions in a very minimal way. She then tried to do a first level of thematic analysis by coding similar concepts and frameworks with colour. We then brought Danielle on board. Not only did she help us create a Miro board, she introduced us to a technology that was capable of expressing and rendering visible a conversation that until that moment, had been internal to us. Important to note, not only did Danielle help create the Miro board, through this process she also reflected back to us our own emerging understanding of practice and engagement. The voice that she brought to our work was both creative and analytical, helping us ultimately in finding a way to communicate our ideas and engagement process to others. We were then able to use this at a presentation on 29th April 2022 entitled Relational Engagement: A Vision for Community Driven CBGL, at a seminar hosted by Communty-based global learning collaboratory. Being able to articulate our ideas and invite others to reflect on the meaning and experience with relational engagement in their own contexts is important in terms of how we grow this work. The three versions of the story are represented below.
What did we learn…? Where next?
This practice of engaging with each other and starting with our own practices has been a very powerful journey, one that is ongoing and dynamic. In our different practices, we have all engaged with the concept of relational engagement from different starting points: relational mentoring (Maureen), pedagogy framed by radical empathy (Janice), and practices of cultural humility (Richard). However, underpinning all our work has been a deepening notion of relational engagement with care, intentionality, social justice, and the centering of the student and community in the pedagogical practice.
References
Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. A. K. Press.
Community Development Resource Association (2004/2005). CDRA Annual Report.
Fletcher, J. K., & Ragins, B. R. (2007). Stone center relational cultural theory. In (B. R. Ragins & K. E. Kram, Eds.) The Handbook of Mentoring at Work: Theory, research, and practice, 373-399.
Jordan, J. V., & Schwartz, H. L. (2018). Radical empathy in teaching. New directions for teaching and learning, (153), 25-35.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring. University of California Press.
Noddings, N. (2005). Caring in education. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education,1-7.
Reeler, D. (2005) Horizontal learning: Engaging freedom’s possibilities. CDRA Annual Report.
Tervalon, M., & Murray-Garcia, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of health care for the poor and underserved, 9(2), 117-125.
Vandermaas-Peeler, M. (2021a, February 18). Mentoring for learner success: Conceptualizing constellations. Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. Retrieved from https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/mentoring-for-learner-success-conceptualizing-constellations
Vandermaas-Peeler, M. (2021b, September 1). Mentoring for learner success: Developmental mentoring relationships. Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. Retrieved from https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/mentoring-for-learner-success-developmental-mentoring-relationships
Vandermaas-Peeler, M., Moore, J.L., & Allocco, A.L. (2023). A constellation model for mentoring undergraduates during COVID-19. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 11.https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/TLI/article/view/75405/56577
***
[1] Reeler (2004/2005:7)s
[2] brown (2017:28)
[3] brown (2017:42; emphasis added)
[4]https://reworkme.net/business/relational-engagement/
[5]https://heartforlebanon.org/history/; http://hospitalchurch.org/sermon/relational-engagement/; https://ieje.org/relational-engagement/
