ABSTRACT
Psychological Pillars of Transformative Education: emotional and relational processes focuses on understanding the challenges students experience in diversity courses and presents five central emotional and relational processes that can be developed throughout the course to meet these challenges. We discuss the resistance and challenges that often emerge in courses focused on diversity, oppression, and privilege. We examine the ways that students’ prior socialization relates to these challenges and examine the psychological functions behind typical resistance behaviors. We then develop five central emotional and relational processes that are foundations of understanding and developing successful teaching strategies: (1) cultivating reflexivity and exploration of positionality; (2) engaging emotions, (3) fostering perspective taking and empathy, (4) promoting community and relational learning; and (5) encouraging agency and responsibility. For each of these, we describe its relation and importance to diversity teaching, offer examples of resistance behaviors related to that process, present general strategies for teaching that can be used across the semester to advance the development of that emotional and relational process, and consider general strategies for professors’ own self-care and well-being. We highlight how these emotional and relational processes are intersectional. We discuss how developmental aspects of the course influence what processes are more central to learning and teaching, which is taken up in future chapters focused on specific time periods of the course.
