ries of academic and behavioral problems in school. The trip, which was reported in the na-
tional press, was the culmination of 2 years of hard work by both the students and their
teachers.
The consensus among parents, teachers, administrators, and the children themselves
was that their experience in the chorus had transformed students. Yet transformation can
be a fragile thing. Soon after the trip, Ms. Grussner announced she had a chronic illness and
would leave the school and her chorus to return home permanently. Threatened by the loss
of their relationship with Ms. Grussner, old patterns of school behavior reemerged among
some of the children and at least one of the lead performers was threatened with being held
over (Hartocollis, 2001a, 2001b).
The story of Johanna Grussner and the gospel choir is not a unique story. The impact of
caring relationships on students and the frailty of transformation if these relationships falter
have been described in popular movies such asBlackboard Jungle(1955),The King and I
(1956),Stand and Deliver(1988),Dead Poets Society(1989),Dangerous Minds(1995), and
Playing from the Heart(2000). Each of these movies tells the story of a teacher who connected
with students emotionally and was able to build on the connection to change the way they
functioned in school and the world.
Perhaps the leading proponent of the importance of relationship in teaching is the femi-
nist philosopher and psychologist Nel Noddings. In the conclusion toCaring, A Feminine Ap-
proach to Ethics and Moral Education(1984, p. 197), Noddings argues for reorganizing schools
based on an “ethic of caring” and a “maternal attitude.” In such a school, “rules are not sa-
cred,... what matters is the student” (p. 178), and the most important task of the teacher is
to model what it means to be a moral caring human being.
Noddings explains that “[a] teacher cannot ‘talk’ this ethic. She must live it, and that implies
establishing a relation with the student” (1984, p. 179). Noddings’ approach is similar to John
Dewey’s idea, discussed in chapter 1, that effective teachers connect subject matter to the
lived experience of their students and create classrooms where experience is a crucial ele-
ment of curriculum. It is also consistent with Michael Apple’s ideas about “hidden curriculum.”
Apple (1979) believes that in every school and classroom there is a basic set of unstated and
unexamined assumptions about right and wrong, what and who is valued, and the way people
should be related. Usually the hidden curriculum pits students into competition for limited
teacher attention and scarce academic awards. Noddings wants the hidden or underlying cur-
riculum brought out into the open and changed. Education would be based on caring human
relationships, not on formality and rules that act as barriers between people.
The importance of caring relationships for improving education is a cornerstone of the
movement to create smaller, less depersonalized secondary schools. InChartering Urban
School Reform(1994), Michelle Fine discusses efforts “to dismantle the urban high school as
we know it—large, anonymous, and filled with more cracks than safety nets—and to nourish,
in its place, many small, intellectually intimate communities of learners” (p. 2). The most im-
portant aspect of this approach to education is that it ends student anonymity and combats
alienation by fostering relationship and community. Smaller schools and the process of com-
munity classroom building are discussed more fully in chapters 5 and 6.
In my experience, some teachers develop caring relationships with students even in
large, traditional secondary schools. We all know teachers who put in extra time working
with teams and clubs where they develop very close and supportive relationships with their
students. Judy Logan, whom we met in chapter 2, writes about sharing “stealing stories” in
her class without making moral judgments about each other. Presenting their stories of
wrongdoing to people who care about them allows Logan’s students to expose their vulnera-
bility to each other, learn from their errors, and retain their humanity. Herbert Kohl (1994),
104 CHAPTER 4