Introduction

Politicians and popular discourse question the role of higher education. The digital age has helped shape a new generation of students. Though they are not often acknowledged in the teaching literature, Black women activist educators including Nannie Helen Burroughs, Anna Julia Cooper, and Septima Clark identified relationship as important in teaching and learning. The early resistance within the relational theory community led to another name change in the theory’s evolution, and relational theory became Relational-Cultural Theory, an acknowledgment and ongoing reminder that in relationship, people bring their experience of cultural context and that the relationship itself always occurs within the larger cultural context. Douglas Robertson, a leading scholar of college teaching and emotion, proposed that only an intersubjective approach can accurately unpack the teaching–learning dynamic, and to understand the process of good teaching, we must consider what is going on not only for our learners but also for ourselves as teachers.