On Intimacy in the Classroom

Abstract

What is the lived experience of teachers and students in school? How does that lived experience constitute a kind of learning on its own apart from any particular outcome? This article addresses the ways teachers and students encounter one another in schools and why the quality of those encounters is paramount in both the child’s and the teacher’s intersubjective experience. It is a first-person teacher account that looks at a progressive pedagogy within a public school classroom, drawing on fields in a number of disciplines to discuss both the opportunities and perils of a classroom designed to increase our capacity for intimacy.