Don’t Stand So Close to Me: Relational Distance Between Teachers and Students

Abstract

“Why do schools remain if not for meeting?” The manifesto of pedagogical relation uses this question to emphasize the human connectedness of teachers and students as the sine qua non of teaching and learning. In doing so, its authors make use of spatial metaphors of proximity in order to frame their concept of educational relationships. On the one hand, relational pedagogy seeks to overcome the “exclusion,” “isolation,” “alienation,” and “frustration” that are often experienced as a result of bureaucratized systems of education. On the other, it holds that, in all forms of education, it is the relationship, more than anything else, that is taught. But theories of pedagogical relationship need not focus solely on meetings, or connections, between teachers and students. Gert Biesta’s essay “‘Mind the Gap!’ Communication and the Educational Relation,” while principally concerned with establishing the epistemological conditions for learning in the space between teachers and students, has a significant ethical message as its consequence; namely, that a relation between two subjects is defined by distance as well as proximity. Biesta’s essay reminds us that to do away with the gap or disconnect between teachers and students would be to reduce relation to identity, where no teaching or learning can take place. The distance between teachers and students establishes the respective roles that define what they do collectively as education. In other words, being attentive to teaching and learning as a kind of relation might mean keeping our distance.