The pedagogical relation past and present: experience, subjectivity and failure

The pedagogical relation, the idea of a special relationship between teacher and child, has long been a central theme or ‘problem’ in interpretive studies of education, with the term having been established in English some 25 years ago by Max van Manen. Speaking more broadly, themes of ‘student-teacher relations’ and ‘pedagogies of relation’ are common in both empirical and theoretical literature. The German educationist Herman Nohl (1879–1960)...