Teaching Accompaniment

Abstract

Engaging in a complicated world to bring about positive change is challenging. Students often view themselves as either optimistic changemakers helping the “needy” or, conversely, recognize their own privilege and complicity in the world's problems as sophisticated pessimists. Both framings are problematic. Reflecting on his own fraught experiences trying to “help poor children” at a small orphanage in Chile in the early 1980s, the author explores the concept of “accompaniment”—walking together with others—as a constructive framing to move beyond this problematic duality. Drawing on the insights of Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dr. Paul Farmer, and Ophelia Dahl, he explores how accompaniment informs their work. Reflecting on one's own experiences of being well-accompanied opens up new ways of understanding how one might engage in a complicated world. The paper proposes that teaching about accompaniment in the classroom might also model ways to engage in a complex world.