This paper seeks to gain a deeper understanding of students’ experiences of ‘presence’ in daily educational practice. Presence refers to how students are engaged as living, experiencing human beings in the here-and-now (e.g. Dewey, 1934; Heidegger, 1996). Emphasized is a sustained attention and the engagement of persons of flesh and blood or – in other words – not merely intellectually, but also emotionally and physically. Attention and engagement as fundamental issues in education are also object of a rather large domain of educational and psychological research on ‘student engagement’ (Fredricks, Filsecker, & Lawson, 2016); to a lesser extent it is addressed from the perspective of flow (Shernoff, Csikszentmihalyi, Schneider, & Shernoff, 2003). We argue that presence offers an interesting perspective for research from a critical educational perspective, because it may shed light on aspects that often remain underexposed in mainstream educational research. The key contribution of the notion of presence, in our view, is that it directs attention precisely to individual, and thus unique and different experiences of students’ in-the-moment engagement with the subject matter, to the relational and intersubjective character of education and to the incorporation of students’ academic learning as well as personal growth. The overarching framework for our study was mainly based on Van Manen’s (1997) hermeneutic phenomenology and informed by the approach of ‘Reflective Lifeworld Research’ (Dahlberg, Dahlberg, & Nyström, 2008). Data were collected from twelve focus groups with four or five students from the same class, varying from grade 7 to 12. To enhance the quality of students’ descriptions of their experiences as ‘lived through’ a preparation period for the students was incorporated in which they collected their experiences of presence during ten schooldays. When being present, students’ experienced that their self was called into being through and in the way they thought, experimented and felt while connecting to the subject matter as well as through expressing their reasoning and listening to the voices of others within classroom interaction. This particularly happened in an atmosphere of attention and space for exploration. The results indicate the significance of presence for students’ self-awareness, self-confidence and broadened view of the world. Nevertheless, such experiences were designated as fairly exceptional in day-to-day educational practice and stood out in meaning against a background of habits and routines. For students, presence implied transcending these habits and routines by feeling acknowledged as an active subject who can add to the educational moment.

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