This article reports from a case-study (Yin, 2018) in two fifth grade classrooms in the South-West of Norway. The case-study is a part of a Ph.D.-project and involves observations, audio-and video recordings of lessons, interviews, and focus-group interviews. The findings draw on six interviews with two lead-teachers and five focus-group interviews with 31 students. The research question is: How do teachers and students describe mutuality in teacher-student interactions, and how can these descriptions contribute to understanding qualities in teacher-student interactions? Teacher-student interactions are a central feature of what goes on in school and is in the research-field often related to students' educational achievements and effective teaching (Hattie, 2009; Marzano et al., 2003). Nevertheless, the purpose of education involves dimensions other than qualification (Biesta, 2009). Therefore, in investigating teacher-student interactions, this study aims to reach beyond the scope of effective teaching and educational achievement, focusing on exploring the qualities inherent in teacher-student interactions and how these may be understood, taking the perspectives of teachers and students.

Applying Buber's (2002) concept of meeting, interactions between the teacher and the students could be considered as meetings between I and Thou, "a relationship of openness, directness, mutuality, and presence" (Friedman, 2002, p. xii), where both partners meet like equal subjects capable of taking the view of the other. Rommetveit (Helgevold, 2016; Rommetveit, 1974) introduces the perspective, "attuning to the attunement of the other" as an expression of communication where both parties are on the same channel, or they are being in line with each other, as an ethical response to the Other. When the teacher and the students work well together and they communicate and gain mutual understanding, one could say that they are attuned to the attunement of the other. According to Rommetveit, we are in fact "dependent on a dialogical relationship with our fellow being to become human—to get to know who we are. Dialogue creates self-understanding and identity" (Hagtvet & Wold, 2003, p. 201). In Gillian's term, this 'ethics of care' … "refers to our mutual dependency on each other to become ourselves" (Hagtvet & Wold, 2003, p. 201). Drawing on Mead (2015), this mutuality may implicate that the qualities in the interactions between the teacher and the students involve identity-formation for both teachers and students. According to Honneth (1995) such development of a person’s identity “presupposes, in principle, certain types of recognition from other subjects” (Honneth, 1995, p. 37). And since the self is a social self, realized in the relationship to others “it must be recognized by others to have the very values which we want to have belong to it” (Honneth, 1995, p. 86). The theoretical perspectives will be discussed in regard to the empirical results from the analysis of the interviews with the teachers and the students. Constructing knowledge about mutuality in teacher-student interactions can be an important contribution to the field of teacher-practice as well as the further development of teacher professionalisation.

The data is constructed from an eight-week case-study in two fifth grade classrooms in the South-West of Norway. The case-study has a clear qualitative design with an interpretive orientation (Schwandt & Gates, 2018) and a research-approach used to generate in-depth understandings of the phenomenon teacher-student interactions within the context of a real-life situation, everyday classroom-life. Day-to-day observations of the interactions were carried out in the classrooms, corridors, and schoolyard, as well as participating in some of the activities. Nine of the lessons were video-recorded. This paper draws on the findings from the interviews with the two lead-teachers and 31 students. The interviews with the teachers were conducted as a series-of-three interviews following Seidman (2006), to be able to construct rich and in-depth descriptions of teacher-student interactions from the teachers viewpoints. The first interviews were conducted a week before the case-period, while the second interviews were performed in the middle of the period. The last interviews were conducted one week after the case-period. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed using NVivo analysing-software. The interviews with the students were performed as focus-group interviews (Silverman, 2013) with five to seven students in each group following an open interview-guide letting the students talk about and discuss topics regarding their perspectives on teacher-student interactions. Five focus-group interviews were performed in the middle of the case-period, video-recorded and transcribed into NVivo. The analysis drew on Braun & Clarke’s (2021) reflexive thematic analysis as an interpretive method, and three overarching themes from coding the entire dataset were constructed: Meeting, Knowing, and Growing. These themes were constructed from the teachers’ and the students’ statements and may be understood as expressions of mutuality in the teacher-student interactions. The concept of meeting points to the context of a safe environment where interactions between the teacher and the students take place. The concept of knowing points to processes of teachers and students getting to know each other, caring, and building trust. The last concept, growing, refers to statements where both the teachers and the students describe how the other part makes them learn better, inspires them, motivates them, and brings joy into the everyday school-life.

The analysis shows that the interactions between the teacher and the students can be understood as meetings where both actors experience mutuality in the sense of being attuned to the other. Both teachers and students talk about experiences interpreted as mutuality where both actors benefit in the sense of feeling secure. The constructed concept meeting holds that the interactions are more than just neutral communication, but a safe environment where normative and ethical actions take place. The teachers and the students express that they feel safe in the presence of the other, and that they care about the other part. By creating space for personal and spontaneous talks in the classrooms as wells as in the playground, the teachers provide a safe environment for such meetings to occur on a daily basis. The students talk about how they get to know their teacher, and by knowing her better, they feel more secure in the class and they learn better. The teachers explain the processes of knowing as being sensitive to the students’ needs and that when they know each other well, it is easier for the teacher to provide adequate support, both academically and socially. Further, the teachers and the students talk about how the interactions can lead to mutual inspiration and motivation, interpreted as the concept of growing. The teachers talk about how they value seeing the students mastering school tasks, and that the positive interactions with the students can be stress-relieving, while the students say that their teacher inspires them to learn better by facilitating learning-activities in various and fun ways. Following Honneth, experiencing mutual care, trust, and esteem as qualities within interactions can be understood as recognitional practices that benefit teachers and students mutually, here represented by the concepts of meeting, knowing, and growing.

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