Taking Care of the possible: Relational Devices and Educational Transformation in Contexts of Vulnerability

Abstract

This contribution explores the pedagogy of help as a relational and transformative practice, grounded in an ethical-phenomenological understanding of care and vulnerability. Help is not understood as a unilateral act, but as a gesture of proximity, openness, and co-responsibility, situated within a dialogical relationship in which the subject is recognized in their singularity and otherness. Care, as the style of help, implies an educational posture that is attentive to the other in their irreducible fragility and potential, avoiding functional or paternalistic logics. In this perspective, vulnerability is not a deficit to be filled, but an epistemic and ethical resource that opens up possibilities for encounter, transformation, and relational justice. The text weaves together references to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the ethics of responsibility, and critical pedagogies, to outline a conception of educational help as a space of resistance to forms of dehumanization and exclusion. Help thus becomes a political and generative act, capable of reactivating the meaning of the educational relationship as a place of hospitality, recognition, and shared construction of meaning.