Teaching as a Mode of Friendship

Abstract

This essay invites us to consider that we can live and practice teaching as a mode of friendship. This approach involves developing a caring relationship with students, searching for means and moments of speaking as equals, and encouraging shared responsibility for learning together. Educational friendship emphasizes positive and edifying communicative stances and relationships of teachers with individual students and toward classes as collectives. Even given this relationship, teachers and students face ongoing challenges in managing dialectical tensions, which make the sustained achievement of educational friendships a risky and fragile endeavor. These friendships are further limited by teachers' and students' subject positions, the structural inequality that historically and institutionally pervades educational contexts, and the risk of mystification that haunts offers of affection from persons in power positions to subordinates. Emphasizing good will, dialogue, respect for distance and differences among persons, and the equal validity of each student's life and learning experiences, teaching as friendship seeks to establish classes as judicious and caring political communities.