CARING RELATIONSHIPS IN SCIENCE CLASSROOMS - A SYMBOLIC-INTERACTION STUDY

This symbolic interaction study was designed to identify and discover key components about caring science teachers. Grounded theory was gene rated that emphasizes the notion that caring is important in today's s chools and provides insight into what happens in science classrooms. A key pattern that emerged regarding science teachers who are perceived to be caring is that they build a variety of relationships. The kinds of relationships described as caring by the teachers in this study in clude teacher-student, student-student, and teacher-content. The inter action and integration of these three kinds of relationships results i n teacher-student-content relationships. The emergence of relationship s and illustrations of the importance of these relationships is descri bed herein.