A phenomenological and a/r/tographic study of teaching as gesturality in the postgraduate training of professionals in education

Abstract

A literary commentary on a passage from Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark invites us to question the place of the teacher in the transmission of culture. From this starting point, and through a phenomenological and a/r/tographic methodology, we have approached the study of teaching as a form of gesturality within the context of postgraduate education for professionals in the field. The fieldwork was traversed recursively, revealing to us its poetic nature. The results section presents a dual and complementary narrative—textual and visual—that opens up plural pathways of meaning and sense, shaped by the gaze and movement of each reader. The theoretical and empirical emergence of the figure of the teacher as passer has led us to a deeper understanding of the following: (i) that teaching is bound to a living, open question about the adult’s place in the creation of a shared world; (ii) that this place is continually reimagined through the ways in which a teacher subjectivizes their craft; and (iii) that such ways are intimately tied to the loving bonds the teacher weaves with something of the cultural world (in the case under study, books and films). The conclusions point, furthermore, to the idea that teacher education is always a matter of transmission and inheritance of the educational craft.