This symposium brings together three papers from Canada, Australia and England that each take relationality as central to truth-telling and reparative educational work in higher education contexts. Across distinct national, historical, and institutional contexts, the contributors converge on relationality not as a pedagogical add‑on, but as a necessary response to educational harm produced through exclusionary policies, settler‑colonial legacies  and managerial cultures of teaching in higher education .  The relationship between truth telling and relationality in classrooms is a complex and uncomfortable space (Gannaway, 2025) but fruitful developments and learning can be seen in literature in an increasing number of professional disciplines in higher education space such as community-engaged learning (Dobrich,2025), medical education (Williams, 2016),  mental health (Akbar et al,2025) and legal education (Eaglewoman et al, 2022).  We argue this demonstrates a pressing need for higher education institutions to move beyond procedural or compliance‑based approaches to confront historical harms and instead cultivate relational pedagogies that can sustain truth‑telling, repair, and collective responsibility across diverse learning communities. 

The symposium asks three connected questions: 1) why and how has relationality become central to our truth telling and reparative work? 2) what is the current ‘state of the nation’ in how relationality is framed within teaching? and 3) does contemporary literature signals a re/turn to relational approaches?. Our routes are practice‑led and ethically connected, and we explore how working with students, colleagues and wider communities showed that truth telling and reparative praxis requires accountability and shared meaning‑making that cannot be reduced to metrics or indicators. In each context, we treat relationality not as pastoral add‑on but as epistemic practice.  How we know is inseparable from how we stand in relation to others, land, and histories. 

While global policy and institutional discourse increasingly valorise belonging, engagement, and student experience, relational labour remains structurally undervalued within assessment regimes, audit cultures, and AI‑mediated teaching infrastructures. Big‑data preferences and platform metrics re‑centre what is legible and rewardable, risking the eclipse of situated knowledge and slow pedagogies. We see uneven but discernible re/turns in truth telling and reparative practices in our work.  Yet these re/turns are contested by the expansion of techno‑managerial knowledge production, generative AI, and the seductions of standardised comparability. Our symposium situates relationality within ECER’s concern for authenticity and public trust in knowledge. In a time of poly‑crisis, we argue that truth-telling and reparative education requires (re) building relational infrastructures across classrooms, communities, and knowledge ecosystems so that research can act with, not merely on, those most affected. The papers in our symposium offer concrete practices and conceptual tools for making such relationality actionable in classrooms, and that are vital to develop our own and our students' capacities for staying with the discomfort will inevitably arise. 

Akbar, H., Ryan, K. (Yuggera Ugarapul), Gray-Tuapawa, T., & Biumaiwai, J. (2025). Weaving presence—Embodied truth-telling and relational accountability in education and wellbeing [Keynote address]. Indigenous Wellbeing Conference 2025: Walking Together, Flourishing Together: Pathways to Indigenous Wellbeing, Meanjin (Brisbane), QLD, Australia, 20–21 October 2025. Australian & New Zealand Mental Health Association. https://astmanagement.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/iwc25/program/Agenda Dobrich, E. O. R. (2025). A Pedagogical Reimagining of Immigrant Women’s Educational and Community Building Experiences in Canada Through Embodied Learning as Decolonizing Praxis (Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto (Canada)). Dudgeon, P., Ryder, A., Collova, J., Selkirk, B., Derry, K., Hansen, C., … Milroy, H. (2024). Truth telling and truth witnessing: results from a transformative experiential learning program between Aboriginal Elders and non-Aboriginal researchers. Australian Journal of Psychology, 76(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530.2024.2425624 EagleWoman, A., Terry, D. J., Petrulo, L., Clarkson, G., Levasseur, A., Sixkiller, L. R., & Rice, J. (2022). Storytelling and truth-telling: Personal reflections on the Native American experience in law schools. William Mitchell Law Review, 48, 704. https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/wmitch48&id=714&men_tab=srchresults Gannaway, J. (2025). Truth-telling is uncomfortable: a conceptual framework for collectively building teacher capacity for discomfort. Discourse, ahead-of-print(ahead-