Teacher‐Pupil Relationships in Adult Literacy Tuition

Abstract

This paper attempts to trace the dynamic processes involved in the establishment and maintenance of teacher-pupil relationships and to explore some of the frameworks to be found at the level of face-to-face interaction. The article draws upon a qualitative study of one-to-one adult literacy tuition (Braund, 1981), which utilises the perspectives, experiences and definitions of grass-roots participants to provide illumination and insight into an essentially 'closed' world. To these everyday interpretations, concepts from social phenomenology and symbolic interactionism are applied. The study reveals the stage by stage evolution of tutor-student relationships during which individual interpretations and definitions of the situation are combined through negotiation to form a tailor-made working concensus within each dyad. It goes on to show how the seeds of change contained within each relationship cause it to be in a state of constant evolution leading ultimately to its metamorphosis or termination. This emerging pattern, or relationship 'career', provides a framework to an apparently unstructured situation and it is the analysis of this process which forms the basis of the paper. In the late 1970s, when I began my investigation of adult literacy provision, the field was not only unresearched but was still in the process of formation and self- evaluation. Indeed the birth of the Adult Literacy Campaign had been a hasty affair and the explosion of activity in 1975/76 had allowed the government funded