Educational Encounters, Mutuality, Trust and Respect

Abstract

Within educational encounters, there is an expectation on the part of both teachers and students that they would learn from and with one another. Through such learning, both teachers and students are shaped. If learning is the envisaged action, then educational encounters should be constituted by more than just engaging with one another. In other words, learning has the potential to unfold whenever educational encounters are evoked by something else. We are interested in what this something else could and should be to produce educational encounters that have the potential to evoke learning. Consequently, in this chapter, we draw on notions of mutual respect and trust as espoused by Amy Gutmann in our elucidation of educational encounters that could guide learning in some way or the other. Our intention to explore mutuality, respect and trust in relation to educational encounters, is to open up possibilities for different democratic practices instead of more such practices—a matter of reconfiguring democratic citizenship values in relation to ruptured educational encounters.