From Thoughtfulness to Resonance? Recasting Pedagogical Tact as Ecological Attunement

This article argues that Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance offers a more productive way of rethinking pedagogical tact than Max van Manen’s notion of thoughtfulness. While van Manen’s phenomenology of practice insightfully presents tact as embodied, situational, and ethically responsive, its reliance on thoughtfulness leaves unsolved questions concerning subjectivity, methodological opacity, and the theoretical status of the pedagogical relation. The article first reconstructs the conceptual development of pedagogical tact from Herbart to van Manen, showing how thoughtfulness tends to privilege the educator’s reflective interiority. It then proposes resonance as a relational and ecological category that shifts attention from the teacher’s inner state to the responsive field between teacher, student, and world. An argumentative test supports this proposal: the rereading of a scene from Être et avoir, which exposes the limits of a teacher-centred interpretation of tact. The conclusion shows that pedagogical tact is better understood not as the application of reflective subjectivity, but as an event of ecological attunement through which educational relations become responsive to the world.