Currently reading Kelland (2025) on “The ambiguity of trust in higher education”

Trust is important for learning and it’s the teacher’s job to create conditions in which trust can develop, but can there be too much trust, to the point where it inhibits critical thinking? Kelland (2025) looks at this question, starting from a definition of trust as an attitude towards other people that we hope will be worthy of our trust. For us to develop that attitude, we need to accept that the trust we place in someone might well be betrayed, but at the same time assume that it will not. In the context of teachers and students, students then trust teachers to be “epistemic authorities” that can guide and teach them.

But the danger of seeing the teacher as too much of an epistemic authority is that students lower their cognitive load and stop evaluating what the teacher says, and instead just blindly take everything the teacher says as fact. This can then also lead to problems between students. If some trust excessively and others are more critical, those might be excluded by their peers or the teacher, or even choose to self-censor and thus exclude themselves. So trust can be a good lens to look at different teaching situations.

What I am wondering in the discussion here, though, is if understanding trust between students and teachers as mostly epistemic isn’t too narrow. In Felten et al. (2023), they find four categories of teacher trust moves (that we later also use): Cognition (showing knowledge, skills, competences), affect (showing interpersonal care and concern), identity (showing sensitivity to their own and/or others’ identities), and values (showing that they are acting on principle). A teacher as an epistemic authority falls into the cognition category, but if students also feel that the teacher cares about them, is sensitive to their own and others’ identities, and is acting on principle, teachers should be able to challenge students to critical thinking and expression in a constructive way?

But what I find really important in this article, and important to point out in discussions about trust and especially when teaching “trust moves”, is that of course it is not only about students trusting teachers, it is also about teachers acting in ways that earn and don’t betray students’ trust, about actually being trustworthy! That should be the foundation, and “trust moves” are then only about also communicating the trustworthiness to students.

Kelland, L. (2025). The ambiguity of trust in higher education. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 13 (SI2), 119-131.

Featured image, and images below, from a walk after today’s dive.

Fall in Limassol…