Currently reading Farini (2012): “Analysing trust building in educational activities”
This is a really interesting article where Farini (2012) analyses videos of interactions to find trust-building activities that educators do in peace education to build trust between groups of adolescents from different countries.
Farini (2021) highlights that confidence is a “prerequisite for participation in communication and trust […] a condition for specific opportunities of action. Confidence makes opportunities for participation available and trust mobilises specific engagement“. Confidence is needed to participate in all kinds of social systems, including education, and trust is the foundation for the relationships that make the systems work, for example in the classroom. If young people don’t trust education, this undermines the whole system. They write “lack of trust, […] may activate a vicious circle: lack of trust implies loosing opportunities of action, reducing preparation to risk trust, and activating anxiety and suspicion for interlocutors’ actions. Distrust in interactions with specific adults can determine youngsters’ marginalization or self-marginalization: these may be understood as unintended consequences of education“. They understand trust in education as based on primarily expertise, but that is not always sufficient to motivate youngsters’ engagement with educational activities. To be successful, educators should see themselves as facilitators, and in that role “show sensitivity towards [students’] personal expressions“, but even that does not guarantee trusting relationships.
Trust-building between individuals or groups can be facilitated when the facilitator sets and enforces rules for the interactions, so that both sides can slowly recognize each other as human and build confidence in each others’ trustworthiness. For this, the facilitator themselves needs to be trustworthy first and show personal commitment to their role, so that others, based on their trust in the facilitator, are willing to risk trusting each other, if only a little bit, but enough to engage in conversations with each other. Trust can then be build slowly in small steps, each of which is not about anything that really matters, but so that repeated positive experience still build trust over time. Then, trust is not about sympathy or friendship or closeness, but can be built as a working trust out of self-interest, which might or might not develop into interpersonal closeness.
Farini (2012) finds “facilitators’ actions that systematically promoted adolescents’ trusting commitment, upgrading adolescents’ authority in interpretations: promotional questions that open alternatives for adolescents’ actions and highlight adults’ trust in their agency; feedback questions that verify and explore the meanings of adolescents’ interpretations; formulations that both show responsiveness to adolescents’ needs and open alternatives for their actions“.
It took me a while to figure out that this article was both about trust that the young people have in the educator and in each other, but I really appreciate the description of the levels in which trust is built first with the facilitator and then slowly as a working trust between groups, too, and I need to think more about trust in the teacher as a trustworthy facilitator!
Farini, F. (2012). Analysing trust building in educational activities. International Journal of Educational Research, 53, 240-250.
Dipping in early August… Too many papers to read, too little time…
