CIES NEWSLETTER SUBMISSION

Title: Researcher at UCLA seeks international collaborators for a cross-cultural investigation of teacher-student relationships in classrooms

Begin Date: Now

End Date: None

Announcement (I do not have a URL):

I am seeking collaborators in countries other than the United States for a cross-cultural analysis of relationships between teachers and students in classrooms around the world. This study will be based on Alan Fiske’s Relational Models Theory (RMT), which posits that human relationships and social systems are culturally-specific implementations of four elementary relationship models: Authority Ranking, Communal Sharing, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing.  Fiske defines the Relational Models (RMs) as follows:

• “Communal sharing (CS) is an equivalence relation, in which people attend to something important they have in common.  People in each group are the same in respect to the matter at hand; outsiders are different. 
• “Authority ranking (AR) is a linear hierarchy in which people are asymmetrically differentiated in the current context.
• “Equality matching (EM) is a relationship in which people keep track of additive differences, with even balance as the reference point.
• “Market pricing (MP) is based on a socially meaningful proportionality, where the ratio may concern monetary value, utility, efficiency, effort, merit, or anything else.”  (Fiske, 1997, p. 270)

This research project will test the hypothesis that although Authority Ranking remains the predominant Relational Model in most classrooms around the world, others pertain as well, to various degrees depending on cultural and developmental differences.  Methodology for the project is still in process, but will most likely include field observations, focus groups, surveys, and interviews. 

Although RMT has been studied and applied in various domains, no work has been done with it in the field of Education.  This is thus a valuable opportunity to explore our field from a new and exciting perspective.  If you are interested in a possible collaboration, please contact me for more information at:

Sylvia Stralberg

sstralbe@ucla.edu

Or, visit http://www.rmt.ucla.edu/ to read more about RMT.