Abstract

The teacher-student relationship, and how to define it, has often been an area of interest for educational researchers, perhaps because it seems to be so central to the very notion of education itself. Indeed, how might one conceive of the process of education without considering who it is that is being educated, and who it is that is educating? And yet, whilst there are various conceptions of what the role of the teacher is in relation to the student, there is arguably far less discussion around the lived experience of this relationship. Furthermore, the ways in which the teacher-student relationship is defined seems to rest on a somewhat rigid separation of the two seemingly distinct roles. But how are we to understand what a teacher is without the students she is teaching? And how are we to understand what a student is, in strict terms, without the presence of some form of teaching? These questions are central to understanding what constitutes the teacher-student relationship on the one hand, but also, in considering what it actually feels like to be in such a relationship, and what effects this might have for the ways in which we understand ourselves and our roles as either teachers or students.