A Pedagogy of Presence. Philosophical Critique of Pedagogical Impostering

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a philosophical reflection on a pedagogy of presence. To be present to what happens in an educational setting, as teachers or learners, as professors or students, or as researchers, is to bring into play our attention and produce our own visibility in what we do and what we think. Faced with a dominant tradition in philosophy of education, one which defines this activity as a mere rational construction of the educational reality in which rational testing establishes a critical distance between a subject and an object of knowledge, it is suggested here that an ancient philosophical tradition that defines the work of research, philosophical or not, as a way of life and as a process that transforms the subject of experience through the establishment of a poetic distance with reality, be recuperated. The notion of a "pedagogy of presence" is intended to account for the establishment of a proper distance in which the learning subject produces his or her own presence in their learning experience. The paper ends with a critical analysis of a certain pedagogical impostering, which annuls the presence referred to, common in the dominant educational discourse today.