Keith's Critical Friend folder stops in 2016.
The question does not.
Two years later, four researchers arrived at an awkward admission.
Elizabeth Petroelje Stolle and Charlotte Frambaugh-Kritzer had been using critical friends in self-study research for years. Anne Freese and Anders Persson joined them as critical friends for an inquiry into critical friendship itself.
And one of the things they found was that they had not always explained the relationship particularly well.
Their 2018 paper, What makes a critical friend?, begins from that discomfort.
In previous studies, they sometimes referred to critical friends as a way of supporting research trustworthiness without making sufficiently visible how the critical friendship actually worked.
The name was doing too much work.
That should sound familiar by now.
We have already watched critical friend stretch across advisers, colleagues, outsiders, school-improvement relationships, research partners and people whose roles had to be learned while they were doing them.
We have watched Gibbs and Angelides question whether some of those relationships were friendships at all.
We have followed Titchen into companionship.
And we have returned to Keith to find that naming himself a Travel Companion did not settle what the relationship was.
Stolle and colleagues encounter the same instability from another direction.
Their first instinct was to solve it.
Define the thing properly.
Pin down what a critical friend is.
Then their own critical friends started making that ambition harder to sustain.
One of the useful features of the open-access paper is that we can see the inquiry being changed by the people invited to challenge it.
The authors had been trying to narrow the definition.
Their critical friends asked whether the term needed to be pinned down so tightly at all.
The result was not definitional surrender.
It was a change in responsibility.
If critical friendship varied in practice, the researcher could no longer hide behind the label.
They had to explain which version they were actually using.
The 2019 peer-reviewed article, Investigating Critical Friendship: Peeling Back the Layers, crystallised the inquiry around three findings:
flexible definitions
complex characteristics
multiple learning phases
The first finding loosens the category.
The second immediately tightens the work.
Because flexibility does not mean anything goes.
The authors identify three characteristics they consider important to effective critical friendship in their inquiry:
vulnerability
reflection
skepticism
Vulnerability matters because meaningful critique carries uncertainty, risk and exposure.
Reflection matters because challenge only becomes useful if it is worked with rather than merely delivered.
Skepticism matters because the critical friend can fail.
They may believe they are providing a fresh perspective while reproducing the same assumptions.
They may be too close.
Too safe.
Too invested in the shared worldview.
Or simply not doing the critical work the research later claims they did.
That last possibility is important.
For much of the literature we have travelled through, the critical friend has been treated as a solution to somebody else's blind spots.
Here, the critical-friend arrangement develops a blind-spot problem of its own.
Who is checking whether the critical friend is actually being critical?
The authors' answer is not another ideal person.
It is greater explicitness across the life of the inquiry.
Why is a critical friend being used?
What are they doing?
What is expected of them?
And afterwards, what difference did their contribution actually make?
The 2018/2019 work also returns to something we met earlier in Learning to Be Critical.
People do not simply understand a role and then enact it perfectly.
The researchers distinguish phases of understanding from phases of enactment.
You can know what a critical friend is supposed to be and still create the wrong kind of critical space.
One extreme is critique without enough relational safety or shared purpose.
The other is a space so protected by friendliness that very little gets disturbed.
The relationship still has to learn how to carry useful difficulty.
This is not a new problem.
What has changed is the willingness to make the ambiguity itself part of the method.
By 2019, the task is no longer simply:
Find a critical friend.
It is closer to:
Explain what you mean by critical friendship here, why you need it, how it is being enacted, and what would count as it doing useful work.
Stolle and colleagues call for researchers to become responsible brokers of the term.
That phrase marks an important turn in our journey.
A concept that once looked like a role is becoming something that has to be declared in configuration.
Who is this person to you?
What do they know?
How close are they?
How involved are they?
What are they expected to do?
How will you know whether the relationship has changed anything?
Those questions lead directly to the tool that came out of the inquiry.
The Critical Friend Definition Continuum.
Which raises the next question.
If there is no single critical-friend type, what exactly varies?
References
Petroelje Stolle, E., Frambaugh-Kritzer, C., Freese, A. and Persson, A. (2018) 'What makes a critical friend?', in Garbett, D. and Ovens, A. (eds.) Pushing Boundaries and Crossing Borders: Self-study as a Means for Researching Pedagogy, pp. 147–154. Open-access record and paper.
Petroelje Stolle, E., Frambaugh-Kritzer, C., Freese, A. and Persson, A. (2019) 'Investigating Critical Friendship: Peeling Back the Layers', Studying Teacher Education, 15(1), pp. 19–30. doi:10.1080/17425964.2019.1580010. Open-access repository record.