Learning together: Reflections at the intersection of friendship, research, and learning processes

A growing subset of the learning sciences centers how relationality supports meaningful sense-making. Some of this work focuses specifically on friendships, a relational form in which participants share a historical, emotional, social, and cultural intersubjectivity. We wish to re-focus this research in the learning sciences by exploring three kinds of friendships within the field (researcher-researcher, researcher-collaborator, and participant-participant) to understand how these relational forms emerged and expanded our thinking and ways of being. We argue politicized trust and ethical vulnerability are important components of learning in friendships. We offer potential implications for the learning sciences to further our goals of developing theoretically validated, politically explicit, ethically laden theories and designs of learning.