Abstract

The world is in the midst of a dramatic demographic shift: culturally, ethnically, and socioeconomically. To address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, research has examined the effects of teacher-student relationships. This chapter describes a study that used autophotography to examine the ways teachers engage in informal conversations with young children who come from different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, around the child's own photos of home. Specifically, conversations were interrogated to identify what impacts the teacher-student interactions across differences. Using Gee's discourse analysis, this study explored how the teachers built or lessened what the children viewed as significant, how they distributed their social goods—influence, power, or status and how they created or positioned identities within the conversations. The findings inform the mission of enhancing teacher-student relationships and content relevance through providing new insights into how teachers and young children interact, connect, and change within their conversations.

Keywords: diversity, autophotography, teacher-student relationships, conversations
