THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM. A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

Abstract

This article is situated in a philosophical and holistic approach of the critical educational theory (Freire, 1992; Agamben, 2004; Illich, 2011; Bauman, 2013; Biesta, 2009), which shows the inadequacy of the modern rationalist project, where pedagogical science is oriented to  the adoption of standards of measurement and evaluation of educational quality. It is based on the hypothesis that university educational practice has been focused, during the last decades, on the dogmatic-technical transmission of contents and the acquisition of competences to satisfy the labor market. In this institutional panorama of technocratic orientation, my objective is to point out, through a phenomenological-hermeneutic methodology, another educational experience, that of the university classroom; appealing to philosophical traditions (Heidegger, 2005; Gadamer, 2001; van Mannen, 2003). Taking the phenomenological narrative, present in the experiential accounts of participants in the university classroom and
questioning several authoritative voices on the subject, a ritual structure configured by different constitutive elements of the classroom essential for training is manifested as a finding: The word, the attention, the question, the encounter and the conversation.