Review of Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.
By Sean Patrick O’Rourke, Professor, Rhetoric and American Studies
If most of us already know that strong relationships are, as the authors of this book put it, “the beating heart of the undergraduate experience” (1), why should we read the book? The answer is in the subtitle—Relationship-Rich Education is about how those relationships can and should be changed from “happenstance” for “some” students to a central experience for all. Working from the empirically well-established assumption that relationships are important, Felten and Lambert (both of Elon University) interviewed 385 people (204 of whom were undergraduate students) on 29 diverse campuses across the country. Drawing upon these interviews and the stories they reveal, the authors develop a comprehensive approach to cultivating relationships that matter in higher education.
The guiding metaphors of the book stress interconnectivity. Felten, Lambert, and their interviewees speak repeatedly of “webs” of relationships or “constellations” that form student “networks” that in turn encourage, support, challenge, and deepen the learning experience. Student “webs” include other students, teachers, advisors, coaches, tutors, alumni, and a wide range of staff members. At the center of it all, however, is a robust classroom experience that fosters high quality relationships devoted to learning.
Relationship-Rich Education comprises six lean chapters bracketed by an introduction, a conclusion, and a “Postscript in a Pandemic.” The first chapter establishes four guiding principles: all students must experience genuine welcome and deep care (19-24); every student must be inspired to learn (25-28); every student must develop a web of significant relationships (28-33); and every student must explore questions of meaning and purpose (33-39). Chapter Two, “Why Is This So Hard?”, identifies the barriers to a relationship-rich education, including students who feel isolated and insecure, classrooms, curricula, and reward systems that work against relationship building, and the many non-relational demands on faculty and students alike. Chapters Three through Six detail how universities can become relationship-rich places to learn. Chapter Three stresses the importance of cultivating an institutional culture that values and rewards relationship-rich education. Chapter Four focuses on the classroom, “the single most important site for students to experience welcome and care, to be inspired to learn, to build webs of relationships, and to ask questions of meaning and purpose” (80). Chapter Five reconnoiters the vast terrain of non-classroom programs and practices now available on many campuses and investigates the ways in which, inter alia, living-learning environments, civic engagement activities, peer tutoring, and the like help to form relationships that enhance and enrich student learning. Chapter Six explores the importance of quality mentoring and especially the “mentoring conversation,” which may not be the long-term mentor/protégé ideal (one we rarely see anymore anyway) but is nonetheless an often game-changing moment in a student’s life. The conclusion seeks to identify strategies and practical applications that can make campuses relationship-rich learning communities and the postscript stresses the importance of relationships in and despite a pandemic that forced us apart.
The book is valuable in many ways and can help those of us devoted to making the University of the South the kind of residential liberal arts college it ought to be. It can deepen our conversations about affordable housing for faculty on the mountain, for instance (faculty presence at student activities such as debates, performances, exhibitions, and research helps build a relationship-rich community), illuminate the negative effects of one-year here, next-year gone faculty turnover (relationships are best when they are sustained over time), and explain the loss students feel when they are unable to find a seat in required classes (given the centrality of the classroom to students’ relationship-rich education). The book would also suggest, I think, that student retention is but one strand of a much larger web of student success and that attention to a larger culture of learning should also include creating intellectual challenges, asking meaningful if difficult questions, and inspiring learning and the curiosity that drives it.