Category: Relationships

The Balcony is Closed

Featured Photo Credit (edited): Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember, I’ve liked movies. I grew up in a home that watched them, and it’s something I’ve carried on since becoming a parent, myself. I also remember, early on, when I began learning to like movies – that was around age six, when I started watching Siskel and Ebert.

For those who don’t know, of course… that would be Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times.

Originally paired on public television in November 1975, these two critics offered complementary movie reviews in an aisle-side format that was by turns conversant and quarrelsome, and never outright formal although always somehow compelling. For being TV-brief, their reviews were fluent and well-informed – notably so.

But what people really got a kick out of was the keen and perceptive banter and bickering that quickly came to define their relationship, underscored all the more by Siskel and Ebert’s shared zeal for movies and obvious respect for each other’s discernment. Here were two who knew how to disagree, vociferously, by way of some hold upon human foible and dignity that was surely also what sowed their critiques.

Conversely, their uncomplicated rating meme, two-thumbs up or down, condensed these erudite opinions into a succinct Gold Standard for the box office: a trustworthy symbol of substance for movie-goers that also inspired a whole school of empty mimicry, not unlike today’s movie industry, which – rather like today’s movie industry – seems to have missed the point that Siskel and Ebert were making week after week, year upon year, about the kinds of movies worth watching, and why.

For the record, that would be ‘thumbs down’ from me for the culture of sequels, reboots, and non-original risk-averse CGI crap that infests the big screen today.

Siskel and Ebert were iconic, a face-to-face template entertaining enough to earn national stardom and informative enough to sustain an audience across four broadcast moves over a nine-year span. I was at pains, sometimes, tracking down each new program in an era when Chicago newspapers were only to be found at Chicago newsstands.

By the time they reached a sadly abrupt end, in February 1999, Siskel and Ebert had become a media archetype, one lasting nearly twenty-four years. Ebert carried on for twelve more years, as good as ever, but that irreplaceable partnership was always greatly missed.

Today, I still find Siskel and Ebert’s reviews enjoyable, informative, accessible, and relatively timeless. That’s a remarkable thing, when something offered confirms itself as something lasting.

Although… I suppose they haven’t exactly lasted since someone out there today will have likely never heard of ‘Siskel and Ebert’. On the other hand, whatever is familiar probably reflects a culture’s values, whether directly or inversely, just as whatever gets remembered probably reflects what that culture more prefers. Case in point: I sure do miss Siskel and Ebert, these days. And, evidently, I’m not the only one although that isn’t why I posted this. What’s more, it’s no small irony that culture today is rife with critique, the kind of published informal opinions that target every thing imaginable under the sun.

One might even imagine Someone with Plenty to Say posting their YouTube reaction while watching a ‘Siskel and Ebert’ review… and, just so we’re clear, that would be an audience watching a review by a reviewer watching two reviewers offering reviews to an audience of viewers about the value of something to watch. OK, that’s larger irony than I first let on, and I can only guess what Siskel and Ebert might have said about it.

Still, I suspect it might have been one of those times when they found reason enough between them to agree.

Photo Credit: ChatGPT Image Jul 20, 2026, 01_17_33 PM

Check out this 50th Anniversary retrospective from CBS News, which features an equally entertaining montage of Gene Siskel as the critic for Channel 2 News with CBS Chicago.

Conceptualising the In-Between: IV. Interest

Click here to read Part III. Relationships

In between the student-teacher relationship (STR) is “a multiplicity of betweens” (p. 207) in which each contributes by taking interest in other. So what is interest?

interest: mid-15c., “legal claim or right; a concern; a benefit, advantage, a being concerned or affected (advantageously),” from Old French interest “damage, loss, harm” (Modern French intérêt), from noun use of Latin interest “it is of importance, it makes a difference,” third person singular present of interresse “to concern, make a difference, be of importance,” literally “to be between,” from inter “between” (see inter-) + esse “to be” (from PIE root *es- “to be”)

For each person whose interest is to be in between – interresse – with another, that person potentially influences and contributes to the other: each/other. With shared trust and mutual intention, such interest describes a healthy STR, which grows with the passing of time.

Irwin’s analogy is apt, by which education, for Aoki, is inherently bilingual, as it were, occupying “spaces between [a mother-tongue] and additional languages” (p. 41) – between what is known and what is new. Between now and the-yet-to-come, what is new becomes what is known, and so it goes,[1] this course to run, this ambiguity in which to dwell with others, presently, to make a difference for the meantime – to grapple and grow in the interest of each/other.

Curricular interest has its own particular culture and way of being, Irwin continues, sometimes uncomfortable, often challenging, not needfully intimidating. It resists the assimilation or dominance of either “language” and prefers to forge some composite: the outcome, as compared to ‘someone trained’, is ‘more than one educated’.

Moreover, what is known can inform what is new. According to Liu Baergen, the central theme in Aoki’s work is how “lived experiences often contributes [sic] to one’s inner attitudes” (p. 173). I agree and add, from Aoki himself, that we ought “to be mindful of how others help us to open ourselves to who we are…” because it is “others [who] help us in our own self-understanding” (p. 382), who help us to learn from what is known about ourselves something new. It is others with whom we share lived experiences, whose voices join in chorus with ours. Aoki’s claim, taken from Deleuze, seems unmistakable: “‘Every multiplicity grows in the middle’” (p. 205). We are nothing new without each/other.

Aoki describes IB in two ways. First, IB is an abstract ‘place’, a locus of activity, characterised by dialogue and tension. Imagine a furnace in which you and I forge my identity while, simultaneously, you and I forge your identity. In this concerted way, this locus of two coming together, we forge both our identities as well as a shared understanding: we help forge each/other, which I take as Aoki’s description of “belonging together” (p. 396). IB is “the many [as] a unity mediated by synthesis,” e.g. the IB dynamic occurring in between, where “what are related assumes priority over the notion of relation” (p. 396), e.g. a trusted teacher discerning a willing student’s needs.

Also to be found in between is a characterisation of the time spent together, where each step taken is that ‘place’ where we are ‘now’. This is Aoki’s second description: IB as a kind of bridge, characterized by mutuality and journeying, that we mount and cross together. This Aoki describes as “belonging together,” that moment-by-moment amalgamation as each step taken is felt and lived. Where we stood earlier we each might call the ground-of-who-I-am-and-what-I-understand-right-now, i.e. that was you and me then, with that ‘present’ understanding.

Where we alight from the bridge now, as it lands us on the other side, having crossed together, we might call the ground-of-who-I-am-and-what-you-have-helped-me-understand-thanks-to-having-crossed-together. But that’s much too long, so maybe let’s just call it our present ground. By the same turn, let’s call that earlier our prior ground – and “ground” because hey, we all have to stand somewhere… metaphors – like bridges – are only meant to go so far.

More to the point is the duration of time spent crossing the span of that bridge, as if to look back upon the experience and say, “Ah yes, how that was! – that time spent crossing the bridge together,” which might have been worst or best or, more likely, something in between. This is that sense of IB not as ‘place’ but as an experience of ‘places’, a remembrance of what it was like during some time spent together: what we thought, how we felt, how we nudged and provoked each other, how we reacted – all memories now, really – as well as anything we might have decided to take from the encounter – good or bad or otherwise. And as there’s surely more to add, let’s be wary of nostalgia… meanwhile, I think the point is clear. Dwelling in the IB space affords a kind of mediation, a negotiation between us that permits truth or knowledge or learning to be found somewhere along through the middle.

I’m reminded here, as elsewhere, of the wisdom of Dr. King: one more great thinker and teacher who called our attention to the locus in between. As we are all, he claimed, paradoxically yet beautifully this makes us one. We ought to pay heed.

[1] I have a reading and writing exercise for students in which we parse one sentence’s subject and object – respectively, what is known and what is new – as a way to comprehend or predict a sentence that follows. In that subsequent sentence, the previous object is the new subject, and what was new is now what is known. So the cycle rolls – a bit formulaic, or else novel, depending on your perspective. As we create cohesive paragraphs and essays, so we interact with each/other.

Conceptualising the In-Between: III. Relationships

Featured Image Credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay

Click here to read Part II. Logos

If the engine or dynamic force of the In-Between (IB) is purpose, the fuel is surely motive. Together, purpose and motive suggest more about the IB dynamic than mere cause-and-effect, which is a fitting place to refocus upon students and teachers.

For instance, a student’s ownership of their learning and a teacher’s duty to help students learn are overlapping facets of their joint relationship, e.g. “Finding myself involved with [this other person], what is the situation asking [e.g. of me, of them, of us]?” What a teacher purposes alongside a student[1] Aoki characterises not as “instrumental action” but as “situational praxis” (p. 40).[2] From a “bureaucratic device,” he reconceives curriculum enactment into being “a form of communicative action and reflection set within a community of professionals” (p. 40) and, I would add, students too. And he recasts discrete instruction of mandated Curriculum, e.g. ‘covering Chapter 9’ or ‘going over the Study Questions’, as something holistic and shared, e.g. interpreting the relevance for each student of a History text, a Math equation, a Science lab, or a Shakespearean play.

The work that students do alongside teachers, typically (but not solely) daily and face-to-face, is a dynamic that occurs in the shared IB space. The ensuing dynamic interaction of that student-teacher relationship (STR) I conceptualise as relational curriculum, the dynamics of which are pedagogical: lessons planned, activities tried, questions asked, decisions made, and a buzz that enlivens the classroom. Aoki describes students and teachers as travelling back and forth across a “bridge” (Irwin, p. 41) that spans a gap between two ‘places’: curriculum-as-planned and curriculum-as-lived, or as I alternatively label them, mandated Curriculum-as-designed and relational curricula-as-occurring.

While crossing that bridge, it falls to the teacher to decide how best to guide a student, to know whether, when, and from which angle in the clearing they might cast any shadow and obscure a student’s light. So while they cross that bridge, how much better that a student and teacher have come to know their together selves before deciding upon some purpose or destination, i.e. some assessment outcome? This is the gist of relational curriculum.

The relational notion of ‘curricula-as-occurring’ can apply as well in the world beyond as within the classroom, making the IB space a temporal concept as much as a spatial one, i.e. we can only ever be one place at a time. Teaching, then – inclusive of the past, motivated by the future – (and thus, presumably, learning too) is presently spatio-temporal: both at once. Teaching is Aoki’s multiplicitous curricular landscape (Irwin, p. 41, added emphasis) that helps students to reconsider ‘what has been’ in order to renovate ‘what now is’ into ‘what may be’:

… entering back… in full reciprocity by re-including [what has been] once again as active participant in [what now is].

(Aoki, p. 409)

In this way, the IB dynamic can bear influence upon our very identity – not by reaching for it to grasp hold but by reaching out to grapple and grow.

For one as for all, identity comprises coinciding constituents: the past-present-future of one’s been-being-becoming and, simultaneously, the suffusion upon oneself of others’ influences. Identity is an endless chorus by which we share ever more constituencies: this-or-that ‘other’ plus however many ‘others’ besides. To grapple with such concerted complexity, Irwin denotes concurrent possibilities by way of Aoki’s graphic slash symbol [ / ]: a giving-way of the simplistic false dichotomy, either/or, to more intricate “transformative possibilities” (Aoki, p. 406) that weave and intertwine between us: and/not and.

Being “neither strictly vertical nor strictly horizontal” (p. 420), a place both to the left and to the right, the slash symbolises an angle or perspective that is somehow in between. And/not and is a scope in which we might find connection/opposition, concurrence/challenge, or cooperation/competition. The range of what is possible in between is plausible, negotiable, and available to the imaginative decision-making of those involved, e.g. to teachers and students yet also to people paired up in any number of imaginable ways. In between [ / ] is choice, x/not x.

However, the qualification that relational curriculum poses an ethical choice between desirable alternatives makes curricular enactment an empowering decision. So let’s understand relational curriculum as a scope and scale not in the negative, x/not x, but rather in the positive, x/y. In this way, each or both alternatives make possible something new, something more, something different.

In between, we help each other to make decisions, choose directions, and set courses to uncharted places. In a shared IB space, where students and teachers reciprocate, the prescription-paralysis of either/or dualism can give way to the reconciliatory presence/absence of x/y dialogue:

… not in the sense of a verbal exchange, but to denote a process in which there are interacting parties and where what is ‘at stake’ is for all parties to ‘appear’.

(Biesta, p. 43)

Rather than the instrumentality of Curricular implementation as some coarse techno-logicality, IB is conversational process in a ‘place’ where what it means to dwell “in between” is compellingly inclusive. IB is dialogue with those present and with those tangibly absent; it is listening to voices as well as seeking voices that are heard and not heard.

In the back-and-forth of x/y dialogue, the more-than-one constitutes one: in a word, a ‘unit’ or ‘united’. Dialogue sustains the past, to keep it alive and well and with us each present moment. Fuelled not simply by what just happened but also by what could happen, by what could be, IB is a compelling imperative for people to listen and respond, not just as joint actors but also as contributors.

With respect to others, with respect for others, we can reiterate, disagree, misunderstand, or absorb in muted silence, or we can contribute and propel others from this present moment into the next, and the next, and the next thereafter. Remembering the past in the present dresses the future for its arrival.

Click here for Part IV. Interest

[1] Note the syntax and structure of the sentence describing the dynamic of the STR: “What a teacher purposes alongside the student… .” To have written “What a teacher purposes between themselves and the student…” would betray teacher-centered bias, ill suited to IB. Moreover, although the sentence as-is takes a teacher’s perspective, it remains honest since I am a teacher and cannot assume a student perspective. What I can do is empathise and respect the student perspective; if I have earned any genuine respect from students, then – hopefully! – they will empathise and respect my perspective in return.

[2] Praxis is “the aspect which ‘resides in’ the knowledgeable actor or knowing subject” (Carr & Kemmis, p. 44), an “‘informed, committed action’” (Robertson, p. 14) that feeds the dynamic of joint action, like fuel to an engine.