ABSTRACT
The secondary school case study necessitated a consideration of touching practices between teachers and young people who are neither child nor yet adult. The teachers, parents and pupils all struggled to negotiate the meaning of touch in this borderline context. As discussed throughout, our involvement in the research had forced us to question our own contribution to the ‘contamination’ of this issue. This concern was reinforced and extended by one head teacher who feared we were likely to ‘open a can of worms’. Our assumed ability to ‘open a can of worms’ suggests that merely by talking about touching practices we would find things out that were ‘inappropriate’, that should not have happened, but which are best left unspoken. By introducing ‘touch’ as a topic for discussion and troubling concepts and practices that were generally taken to be self-explanatory or tacit, we would be stepping into space that defines what is spoken and unspoken, the inferred meaning, and the suggested ‘other’ meaning of the word itself.
