Teachers’ discourses around the bond with students: stress, confrontation and distance

Abstract

The bond between teacher and student is essential in the educational process. Considering that, the purpose of this research is to understand the discourses that teachers build around the teacher-student bond. In the methodological
design we used two techniques for data collection, the focus group and the episodic interview. Study participants were teachers from four secondary schools in Santiago de Chile and for data analysis we followed the threedimensional
model proposed by Norman Fairclough. The main results show that the teacher-student bond is a complex area and that it causes stress on teachers, who refer to it as a confrontation and position themselves discursively in relations marked by directionality, giving something to the student. However, under specific situations, these relationships between teacher and student are moving towards bidirectionality, as a reciprocal and potential transformation.