Pedagogical Presence as a Mediator of Tertiary Students’ Unconscious Conflicts During Learning

This paper explores the notion of presence pedagogy in the private higher education sector, drawing on contributions from social constructivism and psychoanalysis, specifically the concept of affective containment. Higher education is a space that, by its nature, invokes feelings of defensiveness, uncertainty, weakness and anxiety in students, who arrive in the tertiary space carrying their own unconscious conflicts that interact with the external world. These unconscious processes culminate in behaviours and interactions that influence learning and relational dynamics with their educators. This theoretical paper presents an explanation of the unconscious, but observable processes that neoliberal students transition through in the learning process and offers a position that can usefully serve educators in negotiating and containing these unconscious processes. This paper offers the argument that presence pedagogy can be usefully employed as a method for the educator to perform the role of ‘container’ of these unconscious processes. Presence pedagogy is conceptualized as an educator’s capacity to be reassuring and attentive to their students and draws on relational practices such as an ethics of care to enact appropriate psychological and pedagogical care for the student in learning contexts. This paper proposes that presence pedagogy can usefully mediate students’ unconscious conflicts to settle into a productive place of learning, where the tensions between inner worlds and external demands are contained by the educator and adapted into meaningful learning experiences. By dovetailing an ethics of care with core constructivist tenets, educators can simultaneously hold the student, and the line, forging productive learning experiences while maintaining boundaries and professionalism. In so doing, the student is ‘contained’, and anxieties are mediated to facilitate a learning experience in which anxiety is tolerated and processed by both student and educator. This is not an easy task, nor without risks and limitations, but this paper offers imaginings of how a presence pedagogy might be enacted in a contact private tertiary environment to meaningfully engage with students’ unconscious conflicts in the learning space.