Master & student: an investigation of the methods of negotiating teacher-student relationships in the martial arts

This thesis is an ethnographic comparison of two martial arts training systems, with the goal of discovering what methods martial arts teachers employ to define and negotiate relationships with their students. Informed by the approaches employed by previous martial arts scholars, this study uses participant observation alongside semi-structured and informal interviews to identify important themes of training and teaching in the arts of Hung Gar Kung Fu and Amateur Olympic Boxing. This thesis showed that teacher-student relationships are formed through the activities of student selection, systematized training, and anecdotal guidance, and that these activities are applied in the context of four training structures: the training environment, class organization, the role of teachers in the school, and the formal bow or handshake. Analysis of this data also indicated that this application is influenced by the beliefs and values of the instructor as well as the philosophies of the system being taught.