Encountering the philosopher as teacher: The pedagogical postures of Emmanuel Levinas

Despite growing interest in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in educational theory and practice, little has been done with the fact that for over 30 years Levinas served as director of a teacher education school in Paris, and that he taught classes there for more than 40 years. I attempt here to begin to fill that gap by focusing on Levinas’s classroom practices and everyday interactions with students rather than on his philosophical writings. I sketch three pedagogical postures he embodied and discuss them in relation to ongoing philosophical work in teacher education.