Hermeneutical-dialogic elements for an eco-relational university education

Abstract

This article discusses/elaborates the hermeneutic-dialogic elements of an hermeneutic pedagogy applied to “university teaching”, for an eco-relational education since where there are relations, there are contradictions; where there are contradictions, there is context; where there is context, there is dialogue; where there is dialogue, there is education; where there is education, there is history to interpret; where there is history; there is learning and understanding. We approach to university teaching from the perspective of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics in order to assume dialogue as a source of permanent humanization, of overcoming of differences and approaching to truth. From this standpoint, we propose a dialogic-eco-relational model, which axis is language for an inter-humane understanding of humanizing education spawned by the intersection of theoretical elements coming from philosophical hermeneutics, critical pedagogies and the demands of university teaching as a community of meaning.

The objective of this article is oriented towards the deepening of knowledge and the construction of a theoretical proposal through the hermeneutic dialogue of understanding in order to know and improve the training practice for deep human understanding in the university environment. As a problem, a kind of “monologization” of the formative practice is assumed as an expression of the current neoliberal market education. To do this, we explore Gadamer’s hermeneutic coordinates to shape an eco-relational formation in the context of late modernity and its instrumental r(el)ationality. The phenomenological-hermeneutical method, in its integrating capacity, poses a unique harmony from the ontological and epistemological point of view, by constituting itself as an interpretive-ontological approach, which simultaneously assumes existing, being and being in the world expressed linguistically. We conclude that current and future university education is played out in the exchange between subjectivities and alterities where dialogue is the mediator between the concept and the educational experience, since the ethos of education is dialogue as, in turn, the thelos of education is interhuman understanding