What Do 50 UVA Students Say about Their Relationships with Their Professors and Peers?

An inquiry I had initially was whether or not students recognized the value in forming relationships with their professors and their peers in their classes. To better understand student perspectives and insights on student-professor relationships, I gathered feedback from undergraduate students. I received feedback from 50 UVA students across a spectrum of years and majors. These are the key insights I gleaned from student input:

Regarding student-professor relationships:

• The vast majority of students agreed or strongly agreed that they value building relationships with their professors and see this as an important part of their role as a student (82%).
• The majority of students agreed or strongly agreed that they feel their professors want to build relationships with them (64%) and the vast majority of students appreciate when professors make an effort to know them beyond academics (96%).
• The majority of students agreed or strongly agreed that they view their professors as more than instructors but as role models and mentors (62%) and value opportunities to meet with their professors outside of class (70%).
• However, a little under half of students (46.2%), agreed or strongly agreed that they feel they have strong relationships with one or more of their professors.

Regarding student-peer relationships:

• The vast majority of students agreed or strongly agreed that they value building relationships with their peers (94%).
• The majority of students agreed or strongly agreed they see engaging with their peers as an important part of their role as a student (82%).
• The majority of students agreed or strongly agreed they feel a sense of belonging in their classes (62%).
• The majority of students agreed or strongly agreed they appreciate opportunities to collaborate and discuss ideas with peers (84%), structured activities that allow students to get to know each other (68%) and appreciate when professors encourage student interaction (76%).
• However, a little over half of students (53.8%), agreed or strongly agreed that they feel they have strong relationships with their peers.

"Connections students form with their peers, with faculty, with staff, really drive motivation to learn. So if we want motivated students, we want students working hard in their learning, relationships are a powerful tool for that."

"What students need is not a single mentor but what we call a constellation of mentors -- a network of peers, faculty, and staff who can support them in different ways, challenge them in different ways."

“The job of teaching can be so consuming… for all the best reasons. Right? We love our disciplines. We love our students. We wanna do right by them. We wanna design our courses, refine them, give feedback, practice, etc. And, we can forget that their college experience exists in this broader context with so many other players. And I hope that that faculty take a little piece from that – that they realize, ‘oh my goodness, it’s not all me.’”

“So many of the students that we spoke to had either an implicit or an explicit fear of faculty or an intimidation factor, or ‘I don’t wanna bother them. They’re so busy when they’re in their office hours.’ And one of the bits of guidance that we share with students is to say, you don’t have to go by yourself. You can go visit your professors, office hours, student hours with a friend, with someone from class, and that might kind of lower that that fear factor a bit” - Isis Artze-Vega

"Relations and connections are both human-to-human relationships, the interconnection between self and others and the relations we have to and within a much broader, material, world. Matter matters.”

“Sociomateriality and posthumanism may be ideas you are familiar with, or for some readers these ideas might feel unsettling. They may be something that you become intrigued by and want to learn more about, offering new openings for how you think about your research and practice in higher education. You may wish to take the parts that you feel are most accessible and useful to you although I hope that some discomfort will be pleasurable. The book is written with a view that the reader should not feel they have to read it in a linear fashion but should dip in and out of sections and ideas as they wish.”

"It should be clear that caring requires thinking and the caring characteristic of caring relations has both cognitive and affective dimensions. Both the philosopher, Michael Slote (2007), and the psychologist, Martin Hoffman (2000), put great emphasis on the affective dimension of empathy. We respond empathically when we ‘feel’ what the other is going through or something congruent with the other’s feeling. Caring, as a way of being-in-the-world, prepares us to undergo such synchronous feelings. But caring cannot be reduced to empathy. When we care, we sometimes respond immediately to an expressed need; the need is obvious. However, there are times when we must elicit further expression. We are sometimes too quick to say, ‘I know how you feel’, and misunderstandings arise easily. For this reason, we should strive for empathic accuracy (Ickes, 1997; Steuber, 2006). We have to ask questions and reflect on the answers. Dialogue is fundamental in building relations of care and trust. Within a well-established relation, we are more likely to achieve empathic accuracy. There is a familiar difficulty here of attributing to the other feelings that we would have under similar conditions. Indeed, traditional philosophy and religion inadvertently support this error. We have been urged to ‘do unto others as you would have done unto you’, and as children we were often asked, ‘How would you feel if someone said that to you?’ Care ethics suggests that, as nearly as possible, we do unto others as they would have done unto them. Similarly, in teaching the young to be more sensitive——to be prepared to care——we ask them to think about how the other feels, not how they would feel in the same circumstances. The hope is that, gradually, they will come to understand that, when different people are involved, circumstances are never quite the same.”

The RCT [Relational Cultural Theory] focus on relationship allows me to avoid getting stuck in the idea that I should do this alone. I share the stories of those who help me, attempting to demystify the appearance of lone achievement that can cause others, students, for example, to feel as if they fail if they cannot achieve alone. A lifetime of building relationships gives me a solid set of resources critical to writing this book—I am convinced that if I did not have these people around me, this book would have been more of a struggle and less developed (or might not have come to fruition).

At the same time, we are not always literally in relationship (Surrey, 1985). RCT suggests relationship rather than separation as an organizing principle and concurrently acknowledges that we are not always in active connection with others. Applying RCT in the educational realm, I propose that relationship implies the availability of intellectual and emotional connection. We are not always connected to our students, nor they to us. But ideally they experience us as relationally available to them, accessible for connection. This does not indicate we are literally and infinitely available for a text or call. Nor does it imply that teaching and learning relationships do not occasionally include misunderstandings and conflict. However, in connected teaching, our students ultimately trust that we will reply to them with regard and a commitment to their learning.

This is a deeper sense of availability than “if I e-mail her, she will respond.” Rather, it is the sense that if a student contacts me, I will be intellectually and emotionally available and receptive. I will neither dismiss nor shame the student who does not understand something. I will not judge the student who is afraid of failure. I will meet the student’s curiosity and dreams with enthusiasm. I will offer valid and valuable critique. When I realize that I was not as effective in class or as present on a video call as I intended to be, I will reflect and attempt to do better next time. I will meet students with respect, commitment to their learning, openness, and enthusiasm. I will constantly strive to become a better teacher. I will share the reality of the scholarly life (joy and frustration, collaboration and solitude, obstacles and insight). And I will provide students with challenge and support as I strive to help them strive. In it all, I will honor their humanity and my own.