Listening, Narrating, and Attending to Things. Toward Proactive Relational–Mediational Epistemic Space for Education (after Carla Rinaldi)

This article emerges from a lived engagement with education and addresses a tension arising from concern with “what comes out” of teaching and research, where experience is reduced to representation in order to be made presentable. In this reduction, the very life of education, as something in the making, is set aside, and experience becomes fragmented into separate domains of feeling (across sensory registers), narration, and materiality. In response, this text foregrounds forms of attention that remain responsive to lived situations, through which experience persists, is revisited, and is reconfigured over time. Documentation is approached as an infrastructure that keeps relations open and resists the premature closure of meaning. From the position of the teacher–researcher, I attend to slowness, ambiguity, repetition, and the seemingly ordinary in the classroom. The teacher’s presence in the roles of scaffolder and mentor is reconfigured as an active participator within a network of relations, opening possibilities for arts-based and problem-based pedagogies.