Building, Maintaining, and Repairing Classroom Relationships This Room of Earth and Sky

"Now, more than ever, students need our support. To meet their needs, we try to influence our students to break from the mainstream by inspecting their experiences, and therefore expressing their own values. This endeavor will lead to making choices that are best for them and others. An important pillar to our teaching philosophies is supporting our students in both relating and connecting to society, to have hope and joy for meeting the day full on. We believe in allowing students the opportunity to reveal their life histories, experiences, perspectives, and expectations while themed with the curriculum in our classes. This process will naturally build inter-subjectivity. A higher instance of inter-subjectivity will lead to meaningful relationships and higher achievement. In turn, this will lead to stronger social relatedness and connectedness. This book's purpose is simple: to quickly build classroom relationships in a metaphorical, colorful, and creative way. We try to accomplish this goal by theming our curriculum with phenomenology, experience, and values clarification (PEVC) strategies. We have written this book for all teachers and schools, PK-12 to higher education. The importance of building, maintaining, and repairing relationships is constant. It never lets up. In our work place, we have dealt with the insufferable, the unbearable. We can either give up or seek a solution. We choose to continue crafting and mending relationships. To meet the needs of a variety of educators and leaders, this book is set up in concrete, sequential, and linear fashion. It is arranged to be browsed for quick reference for the teachers who are busy and need relationship building strategies, fast"--