Taking the embodied reciprocity for democratising educational relations seriously, while maintaining our playfulness, we focus on thinking with the concept of the acceptive gaze. The analysis is set in the context of participatory action research in Finnish higher education. We apply the idea of ‘gaze’ from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (1968 [1964]; 2012 [1945]), Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1993 [1956]) existentialism and Jacques Lacan’s (1977[1973]) psychoanalysis, to trial the emerging comforts and controversies We consider the acceptive gaze as a reciprocal, concrete and embodied action. Due to its reciprocal character, acceptive gaze has two cutting edges when it comes to methodology. While it expresses mutual acknowledgement ‘to see and to be seen’ for the equalising classroom teaching methods, it simultaneously plays out as ‘to see oneself seeing oneself’ (see Lacan 1977 [1973], 80) moving towards research methods for unravelling educational settings. This ‘both-educational-and-research-method’ aims to open up the acceptive gaze towards the horizons of democratic becoming, and to see the emerging uncertainties both as troubles to tackle and moments of promise for bettered futures. Despite of its ocularcentric naming of the concept, placing vision over other senses and associating sight with reason (Oxford Reference 2024), we think of the acceptive gaze as a holistic, multisensory experience, not limited to visual sense; instead it covers other sensory signals and the sensuous presences (Ma 2015, 126). Furthermore, the acceptive gaze is a chosen orientation towards the other and the self, striving for a non-judgmental attitude enabling the fundamental differences to coexist and complement one another (Jääskeläinen 2023). We explore the possibilities of the acceptive gaze as an educational participatory practice in co-creating tolerance for the uncertainty which arises from unfamiliar and often uncomfortable feelings when addressing one's body as a reflective medium in different encounters (Payne and Jääskeläinen 2023; Jääskeläinen 2023). We propose that aiming the acceptive gaze not only contributes to creating safe enough learning environments (see Jääskeläinen and Helin 2021; Jääskeläinen 2023) that allow both attachment and difference-making but builds also resilience and capabilities to handle uncomfortable feelings when we engage in holistic learning. Therefore, it also accepts feelings of danger and movement outside the individualistic comfort zones, while keeping the sense of responsiveness and responsibility as educators and co-learners alert. As such, we argue that acceptive gaze strengthens democratic values such as responsiveness, equality and freedom, described in the Prototype Pedagogical Framework developed in the AECED Horizon project.

Jääskeläinen, Pauliina (2023). The Reversibility of Body Movements in Reach-searching Organisational Relations. PhD diss. University of Lapland. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-337-396-9 Jääskeläinen, Pauliina & Helin, Jenny (2021). Writing embodied generosity. Gender, Work & Organization, 28(4), 1398–1412. http://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12650 Lacan, Jacques (1977) [1973]. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) [1964]. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2012) [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Ma, Yuanlong (2015). Lacan on Gaze. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 5(10[1]), 125–137. Oxford Reference (2024). ocularcentrism. Retrieved 19 Jan. 2024, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100245338. Payne, Helen and Jääskeläinen, Pauliina (2023). Embodied leadership: A Perspective on Reciprocal Body Movement. In Elgar Handbook of Leadership in Education ed. Philip Woods, Amanda Roberts, Meng Tian and Howard Youngs, 60–73. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.  Sartre, Jean-Paul (1993) [1956]. Being and Nothingness: The Principal Text of Modern Existentialism. New York: Simon & Schuster.