Developing students' responsibility through resonant pedagogical relationships. Resonance as a critical conceptual tool for improving decision-making in school governance

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Funded by the FNRS, located at the Hoover Chair at UCLouvain 

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This project examines how educational responsibility can be cultivated through pedagogical relationships and how such relationships can inform more ethically grounded forms of education governance. Its central claim is that students’ sense of responsibility develops not through individual traits or cognitive skills, but through sustained, high-quality relationships with educators. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of education, moral psychology, and social theory, the project aims to articulate the relational conditions that foster responsibility as a core component of democratic citizenship.
 

The first research strand investigates how pedagogical relationships shape the attentional dimension of responsibility—our capacity to notice and respond to what matters—by studying the dynamics of recognition, trust, and moral attunement in classroom life. The second explores how these insights can guide decision-making in education governance, developing a normative framework that evaluates policies and institutional practices in light of their effects on the relational fabric of educational life.
 

While drawing inspiration from resonance theory as one among several conceptual resources, the project advances a broader relational ethics of education that highlights the normative primacy of pedagogical relationships in shaping both personal and institutional responsibility.