‘How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?’ Personal Concern and Sexual Desire in the Educational Relationship

Abstract

Drawing on both philosophical and imaginative sources, this article explores the profile of concern and caring in the teacher–learner relationship. Following a defence of the role of narrative in educational theory, the nature of the teacher–learner relationship and the role of concern in the relationship are addressed. The main part of the essay draws on the autobiographical fiction The Pupil: A Memory of Love by Irish author Monk Gibbon to demonstrate the process whereby shared passion for literature can become—on the part of the teacher—an obsessive sexual desire for the learner. Eschewing virtue‐signalling and moral grandstanding, the third and concluding part of the essay endeavours to explain the inappropriateness of the erotic in the teacher–learner relationship.

Out of Love for Any Thing? A Response to Vlieghe and Zamojski on Some Pedagogical Problems with an Object-Oriented ‘Educational Love’

“…The dangers of confusing shared passions and, for instance, sexual desire are well and justly explored in Kevin Williams’ contribution to the same Special Issue. But the ‘inappropriateness of the erotic’ (Williams, 2019, p. 560), we would argue, is perhaps better dealt with through open conversations on the subject in Teacher Education, rather than by generating a myth of eroticism's complete surmountability in the essentialism of an educational love.…”