The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of using attentive involvement as an approach in researching the meaning and significance of attentive involvement in educational relationships. Not only does education have a task in terms of socialisation and qualification, it also has an emancipatory task, that is the task of ‘helping’ the pupil to find and engage with his own freedom. It is exactly in this emancipatory task, which one could define as the ‘educational task’, or as Biesta puts it, as the task of ‘subjectification’ (Biesta, 2018, 2015), that an ‘attentively involved’ relational approach between teacher and pupil seems to be of essence (Koerrenz, 2017). The only way for a pupil to find his own subjectivity, his own freedom, is, as for instance Bollnow states, in the encounter with someone else (Bollnow as cited in Koerrenz, 2017, p. 31). In order to research the meaning of this attentively involved educational approach an attentive involved research approach seems to be appropriate (Bastiaansen, 2019). By doing so, it is possible to give the phenomenon of attentive involvement, as for instance Koerrenz states, ‘the chance of appearing as fully as possible and on its own terms’ (Koerrenz, p. 43). In other words: it prevents us from reducing ‘indefinite’ phenomena to ‘definite’ ones (Dahlberg, Dahlberg & Nyström, 2008, p. 121) and allows us to ‘expect het unexpected’ (p. 123). In my PhD-research I try to investigate attentive involvement in an ‘attentively involved’ way. But what does it mean to conduct research in an ‘attentively involved’ way? What does it require of the researcher? Which obstacles are encountered? How can its methodical validity be ensured? And last but not least: What kind of ‘information’ can be gathered, when the entity we are researching cannot be determined? In my presentation I will go into these questions supported by a number of cases in my PhD-project.
