Saper vedere. Per una fenomenologia dello sguardo educativo

In the process of becoming a person, the primacy of the relationship over the formation and development of the Self is an important pedagogical principle. Human existence is interwoven into a complex intersubjective texture from which emerges the personal identity. In this process, the gaze of the other represents a decisive educative fac-tor: our capacity to see ourselves, in fact, depends on the way we are seen by others. But, in the educational work as in the mythological and literary metaphors, the gaze of the other can also paralyse and turn someone into stone. In this article a phenomenology of the gaze is outlined, in order to describe its possible forms and to understand their educational implications. The first educative act towards someone else is the gaze we turn upon him. As educators, we need to learn how to exercise a gaze capable to see what he is and, especially, what he is not yet. On the contrary, the deformations of the educational gaze prevent us from appreciate his uniqueness and, above all, threaten to preclude him from the possibility to grow and change.