1. Choose a quote from the article below and explain why you think it is important or insightful. 2. Write a couple of follow up questions about the article. 3. Write a personal connection to what was discussed in the article. Article:   Engaging in a complicated world to bring about positive change is challenging. Students often view
themselves as either optimistic changemakers helping the “needy” or, conversely, recognize their
own privilege and complicity in the world’s problems as sophisticated pessimists. Both framings
are problematic. Reflecting on his own fraught experiences trying to “help poor children” at a small
orphanage in Chile in the early 1980s, the author explores the concept of “accompaniment”—walking
together with others—as a constructive framing to move beyond this problematic duality. Drawing
on the insights of Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dr. Paul Farmer, and Ophelia Dahl, he explores how
accompaniment informs their work. Reflecting on one’s own experiences of being well-accompanied
opens up new ways of understanding how one might engage in a complicated world. The paper
proposes that teaching about accompaniment in the classroom might also model ways to engage in
a complex world.
KEywoRdS
Change, Development, Experiential Learning, Gustavo Gutierrez, Paul Farmer, Pedagogy, Theory-to-Practice
INTRodUCTIoN
When I was 23 years old, I went to South America for the first time. I planned to volunteer at a small
orphanage in Santiago, Chile. I studied philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, giving me a solid
classical education and no preparation for my ambitious plans to change the world — or at least the
lives of the children at the orphanage. It was 1982, and I knew little of Chile’s military government
and the upended political and economic situation I was about to enter. My Spanish was terrible.
Those limitations, though, in no way tempered my vision of the many plans I had to improve
the lives of the 13 children I would soon meet at the Domingo Savio orphanage, located in a poor
neighborhood on the outskirts of Santiago. Shortly after arriving there, I lined them up and, in my
broken Spanish, explained how not only was I going to live with them but that we were also going
to work together, joyously, to create a family farm. “Ustedes estar feliz,” I told them in my broken
Spanish. “You to be happy.” The kids looked on quizzically. Most were under eight years old.
I exuded an earnestness that was enormously well-intentioned; in retrospect, embarrassingly so.
Truth be told, I did not have a clue about the challenges Chile was facing, the ordeals these kids had
endured, or what I was doing.
International Journal of Innovative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Volume 4 • Issue 1
2
About three months after I arrived, toiling with a less-than-enthusiastic group of kids in the hot
Santiago summer to launch my vision of a family farm to improve everyone’s lives, I became ill, very
ill. I landed in bed with a fever that climbed higher each day and learned I had para-typhus. I stayed
in bed for more than three weeks except for going to the bathroom.
The people I had so earnestly come to serve (and whose lives I had imagined transforming) had
to take care of me. I wept, partly from the illness, but mostly out of frustration at how little the vision
of me sick in bed resembled the one in my head of an autonomous me helping the needy them. That
equation had been flipped.
Though they had few material resources, everyone at Domingo Savio — adults and children
— cared for me with incredible grace. A month or so later, having been tended by a doctor and
generously provided with medicine (bought with money I still do not know the source of), chastened
and humbled, I began re-evaluating many things. One was my assumptions about how we think about
“helping the poor,” one version of which is called “international development.”
Many years later, I wrote a book called Santiago’s Children: What I Learned about Life at an
Orphanage in Chile about my two years living at Domingo Savio and based on journals I kept. In
many ways, it was a cautionary tale of the many things that can go wrong from misguided good
intentions. At the same time, I also learned that children can be incredibly resilient, especially
when given structure and love; that repression, unemployment, and illness all undermine
one’s sense of inherent human dignity; that U.S. policies reverberate around the world and can
dramatically impact national policies that impact people who have no interest in politics; and
that maybe, just maybe, it was not so bad to have big dreams, even if they fell short, as clearly
they did in my case.
Even when the book was published in 2008, more than 25 years after I landed at the orphanage,
I still did not have the precise language to describe what I learned in Chile. Over the past years, I
have realized that the word is accompaniment — the working and walking with others, not bestowing
charity on them.
Haltingly, tentatively, at first, I realized that one of the central things I learned in Chile was
how well I had been accompanied and, as such, transformed. When I most required it, the people of
Domingo Savio were at my side: hailing a doctor, scrounging up the resources to buy the medicine
I desperately needed, and nursing me through my illness. They did not see their caring for me as a
grand gesture of generosity; they simply did, in the moment, what needed to be done. But it was not
only when I was sick that they accompanied me. They accompanied me — especially the kids — as
they taught me Spanish and helped me understand the complexities and nuances of their lives and
the possibilities for finding some paths forward, which we began to work on together.
Even though I had landed on their doorstep with plans to be “their helper,” they accompanied
me, and during those first two years and the many intervening ones, I think I have learned – and am
still learning– to accompany them as well. For all my mistakes, something worked well in our time
together, and a little like the character in Moliere who discovered to his astonishment that he had
been speaking prose all his life, I have realized that we have been on a journey accompanying one
another for a long time.
Now, more than 40 years later, Domingo Savio and the people associated with it remain a central
part of my life. I remain connected to the “kids,” who now have their own families, and to Domingo
Savio, which is still located in the same house (though it is no longer a residential orphanage but a
neighborhood center working with — might I say accompanying — local kids and their families).
My life has been enriched through those relationships, and the concept of accompaniment has given
me a new lens to understand my teaching and global development work.
International Journal of Innovative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Volume 4 • Issue 1
3
A THEoRy oF ACCoMPANIMENT
I returned to Notre Dame a decade ago to teach global development, explicitly emphasizing international
health and educational systems. Over time, I have found that the concept of accompaniment primarily
influences my work and teaching.
Three people, in particular, have helped me understand the importance of accompaniment: Fr.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, Paul Farmer, and Ophelia Dahl. These three and many other wonderful friends and
colleagues came together at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies
for a series of workshops beginning nearly a decade ago that explored how accompaniment relates
to individual relations and the work of international organizations and global health. The workshops
included many Notre Dame colleagues and professionals connected with Partners In Health (PIH),
including co-founders Farmer and Dahl, who see accompaniment at the center of their global work.
Sadly, Farmer, who did so much to promote the idea of accompaniment in his global health work,
passed away unexpectedly in February 2022.
Several ideas from those conversations have stayed with me. On the theological side, I was
struck by how every major religious tradition, including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and
Christianity, has as a central concern of connecting our lives with those who are downtrodden, the
victim, the widow, the orphan, and the poor. The admonition is consistent across all traditions: Look
beyond your immediate concerns; show compassion and accompany one another.
Catholic social teaching, particularly liberation theology, has engaged deeply with the importance
of accompaniment. Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez, often referred to as the “father of liberation theology” and
at the time who was spending half his time in his native Peru and half his time at Notre Dame, placed
great emphasis on accompaniment and linked it strongly with solidarity and compassion.
“Solidarity with the poor means not to try to be the voice of the voiceless,” Gutiérrez (2016)
said at the workshop. “This is NOT the goal. The goal should be that those who have no voice today
will have a voice and will be heard.”
Solidarity is about our relationship with the other, and through the practice of accompaniment,
we make it real and move it forward. “To accompany is to help the person take their own destiny in
their hands and allow that their voice is heard,” Gutiérrez (2016) said. “Some people are happy only
if they are helping,” he added, with a note of caution in his voice. “This is a question of friendship
- you must learn to be beside, walking with another person.” It is a reciprocal relationship. One
cannot accompany without being accompanied; in the same way, someone cannot be a good friend
without being open to friendship. This requires a great deal of humility. Not only is it important to
walk together with somebody, but one must also learn how to be accompanied – to participate in the
reciprocity of accompaniment.
Gutiérrez also saw compassion as a critical part of accompaniment. “The word compassion is
very beautiful,” Gutiérrez (2016) said. “Compassion is not only to suffer for the other, but it is also
to be in sympathy with another.” It means to be close to the other, to accompany the other.
Gutiérrez’s work has profoundly influenced PIH’s Farmer, and together they produced an inspiring
volume of conversations about life, liberation, and the call to accompany the poor, titled “In the
Company of the Poor” (Griffin & Weiss, 2013). In their dialogues at Notre Dame, they agreed that
theology and global health must be animated by “accompaniment in action.” Accompaniment is a
theological concept that has reverberations in the secular arena.
“Accompaniment is an elastic term. It has a basic, everyday meaning,” Farmer (2011) wrote
in an article on accompaniment published in Foreign Affairs. “To accompany someone is to go
somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and
an end. There is an element of mystery, of openness, of trust, in accompaniment. The companion,
the accompagnateur, says: “I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads; I’ll
share your fate for a while. And by ’a while,’ I don’t mean a little while.” Accompaniment is about
International Journal of Innovative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Volume 4 • Issue 1
4
sticking with a task until it is deemed completed, not by the accompagnateur but by the person being
accompanied.
Accompaniment reframes the idea that we are working to help people “over there,” in recognition
of the fact that “over there” and “here” are intertwined. The beauty of using accompaniment is in
blurring the lines between us and them, doctor and patient, donor and recipient, expert and novice.
Instead, we are partners, walking together toward a better future.
“One of the joys of having accompaniment as a central part of PIH’s mission,” said Dahl, a
leader at PIH since its earliest days, “is being forced to explain accompaniment. It is not easy work
explaining that community health workers are more than just community health workers… not just
people with technical roles in the health system, but accompagnateurs … they are part of a new social
movement that is profoundly transformational.”
“I think the work you are doing at PIH is great, but is your model sustainable?” a student asked
Dahl during a visit to my class at Notre Dame. It is an important question — one that anyone working
in development should be asking, right?
Dahl wondered aloud whether we sometimes use concepts like “sustainable” or “cost-
effectiveness” as cop-outs for not doing the hard work of accompanying one another.
“If a single mother were sitting here,” Dahl said, “you could easily ask her the same question.
Is the path she is on sustainable? I imagine she’d give you an answer something like, ‘I don’t know
how it will be sustainable, but I’ll take care of my child. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll do
whatever it takes.’”
So maybe accompaniment is partly to do whatever it takes (PIH’s informal motto) and walking
together, working together, and discovering the path — a path that will be sustained over time —
together.
ACCoMPANIMENT IN HIGHER EdUCATIoN
The concept of accompaniment serves as a kind of North Star in terms of the substance of what I
teach and how I teach. It also points toward purpose, the why. Accompaniment can facilitate a return
to the core purpose of the educational endeavor, aligning with the joy and pursuit of lifelong learning
as part of a learning journey together.
Many college students are passionate about the topic of development. Most of my undergraduate
students have had many more opportunities to engage in the world than before I went to Chile at
age 23. Whether through family, school, service, or religious organizations, many have traveled
internationally — often to Africa, Asia, and Latin America — even before they arrive in college,
and they have even more opportunities during their college years. Their wide-ranging experiences
have significantly impacted them, and they bring various perspectives to their classes. At one end of
the spectrum are the earnest world changers. These students have often already created their non-
profit organizations and written about their service organizations in college application essays. Their
earnestness is sometimes associated with an ambition for self-realization: I am creating something
that helps others and recognizes me.
On the other end of the spectrum are sophisticated pessimists. They have read anthropologists and
economists who explore the perils of development, engaging literature like Dambisa Moyo’s Dead
Aid and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have
Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. These students can mobilize data to demonstrate that much
of international development, especially in Africa, has not only been ineffectual but often has made
things worse by creating perverse incentives and unintended consequences, including corruption,
all under the name of humanitarianism. These students consider themselves rigorous and critical
thinkers. Dismantling the “white savior complex,” along with their own complicity and privilege, they
are skeptical about development being able to make significant positive contributions to the world.
International Journal of Innovative Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Volume 4 • Issue 1
5
These are stereotypes, caricatures to be sure, but there is still something to them. Notre Dame
is a Catholic University with a strong service and social justice ethos. However, over the last decade
teaching here, I find more students moving from the first category (earnest world changers) into the
second (focusing on their privilege and complicity).
In both cases, I sometimes struggle with how best to engage them in a learning process,
acknowledging that any attempt to bring about meaningful, positive societal change needs to be
made thoughtfully, respectfully, and collaboratively, reflecting how Johnson et al. (2007) show the
benefits of social interdependence and cooperative learning on students and faculty. In addressing
critical issues of poverty and poor health, systemic racism and inequality, lack of education, and
environmental degradation, one risk is becoming arrogant and self-important in our efforts to help
the unfortunate poor. The other risk is believing that things can never change for the better, an attitude
nearly certain to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“To not be optimistic is just about the most privileged thing you can be,” Dahl shared with my
development class on another occasion. “If you can be pessimistic, you are basically deciding that
there’s no hope for a whole group of people who can’t afford to think that way.”
This is where the framework of accompaniment is so constructive. It helps provide a path forward,
usefully informing both ends of the spectrum, from the earnest world chargers to the sophisticated
pessimists. In the accompaniment model, we are in this together; we are implicated as partners in
the mix, sharing in the complexity and chaos of each other’s lives.
As a result, when challenges occur, as they always do, walking together makes you less likely to
be arrogant and think you have all the solutions. You are also more likely to be connected with the
real lives of real people, and motivated to figure out together something that moves the relationship
forward. Accompaniment inverts the impulse of “how do we help them?” into an assertion of “we’re
in this together.” We are connected, tied, and bound together. We need to walk together and learn
together; and maybe, together, envision and create something better.
ACCoMPANIMENT IN THE CLASSRooM
In recent years, I have realized that accompaniment provides a bridge to link theory and practice of
what is effective – what “works” – in development. You are closer to the people and genuine problems,
grounded in relationships with others, putting the educational experience in a new perspective
(Lederach, 1995).
Considering accompaniment in the classroom context raises questions about tensions brought
to the accompaniment relationship by inequalities of background, luck, resources, expertise, and
privilege. What happens when one is rich and another poor? Doesn’t that bring an uneven quality
to this partnership of walking together? How does one bridge the gap in the unequal relationship
between the “giver” and “receiver”? What if one is an expert, for example, and the other not? Where
does one even start?
Instances of accompaniment in practice give insight into some of these questions. A good physical
therapist, for example, brings resources and expertise to the relationship working with you, but cannot
get very far without your engagement. A good physical therapist needs to help you get to a different
place, encouraging you to do as much as you can at the time you can do it. Experience suggests how
fast or slow that process might be. There needs to be listening as well as advice, addressing and
strategizing how to overcome obstacles, confronting setbacks, and sometimes even prods and cajoles,