Relational pedagogy and educator wellbeing: navigating care, identity, and institutional conditions in higher education

While relational pedagogy is widely acknowledged to foster student engagement and belonging, its implications for educator wellbeing remain underexplored. This qualitative study explores how academics experience relationship-centred teaching and how these experiences influence their wellbeing. Drawing on interviews with 15 educators at an Australian university and informed by Self-Determination Theory, academic identity scholarship, and emotional labour theory, the study conceptualises educator wellbeing as relational, contextual, and systemic. Participants described relational pedagogy as a meaningful and motivating practice that affirms identity, purpose, and connection. Yet they also highlighted the emotional toll of sustaining caring relationships within institutional cultures that often overlook or undervalue such labour. Relational teaching emerged as both energising and depleting, an ‘emotional paradox’ shaped by workload pressures, recognition gaps, and structural constraints. By foregrounding educators’ voices, the study challenges individualised notions of wellbeing and reframes it as an outcome of relational and institutional conditions. The findings call for a cultural and structural shift in higher education to support the emotional sustainability of teaching. This study contributes to growing calls for systemic approaches to educator wellbeing and expands understandings of relational pedagogy as a site not just of student impact, but of educator care, identity, and resilience.