Neoliberal assaults upon public education have been grounded upon the supposition that schools are failing to prepare students to respond to local and global economic needs and realities. The result has left the relational between pupils and teachers as a taken-for-granted practice. Lived experiences often can show and capture the unexpressed in taken for granted moments. This discussion presents teaching as relational moments, shared between beginning teachers and pupils. We employ a phenomenological sensitivity as we unravel the anecdotal evidence to (...) bring into language a “lived through” dimension of human relations. As teacher educators, we ask: what is experienced when relationality is the focus for beginning teachers? The importance of this question is due to the prevalence of neoliberal forces that now guide, and to large extent, control what it means to teach in schools across Canada. In an effort to understand this emerging view of teaching, we explore what four preservice teachers from Nova Scotia experienced in becoming teachers, as they completed their final Field Experience in Bergen, Norway. We share these anecdotal representations to help teachers see how the relational informs identity in becoming a teacher and allows teacher educators to deconstruct the “taken-for-granted-ness” of teaching stuck in the rational-technical model. (shrink)

The paper exemplifies how we as teachers see children, and indicates ways of understanding the existential educational meanings of what we see. The authors suggest that the phenomenon of seeing is a personal and relational intentional act that opens up, as well as delimits educational practice. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach to education is suggested and the thought of seeing and telling as interwoven representations is put forth. However, despite a phenomenological inquiry’s immense qualities as a pre-reflective experiential source to understanding, (...) the authors believe that phenomenology cannot overcome or erase the aporetic unavailability of a pedagogical practice and a pedagogical-ethical language. The paper intends to show that seeing pedagogically always will be more complex, paradoxical and unsettled than what can be shown and told phenomenologically. (shrink)