Rapport in the classroom: Problems and strategies

This paper is the result of a collaborative self study between a beginning teacher and her university lecturer, and their experiences of teaching English in two university settings. It explores the relationships and critical pedagogies in both of the teachers’ classrooms and their attempts at establishing successful teaching-learning relationships, or ‘rapport’ as we name it. Our primary aim was to observe, discuss and reframe our rapport building strategies and problems. We believe rapport is particularly important within critical literacy because of the kind of transformations that we aim to enable. Supportive, open relationships are the foundation of all successful teaching-learning relationships and most especially for transformative pedagogies. We believe that a discussion of relationships should sit at the heart of critical theory and we see this discussion best initiated with self study.