Encounter is a problem. There is no educational happening without encounter, but encountering the other is difficult. The emphasis placed on the word relationship in educational discourse runs the risk of watering down its meaning. This must therefore be specified and in this way qualified in an educational sense, enhancing not only the theme of dialogical exchange, but also those of collision, interference, request and injunction, in other words: of encounter. In the encounter there is always a double movement or, at any rate, a counter-movement: no matter how much I direct myself towards the encounter, that the encounter happens does not strictly depend on me; in the encounter there is a dimension of irreducible passivity both as regards me and the other. So, to be such, an encounter cannot be prearranged, it must be unplannable or, put another way, it must have a component of the unexpected. The encounter, by definition, borders on and pushes into the unknown, it is, in that sense, something that escapes the categories we have at our disposal in advance to foresee it and, therefore, ultimately to understand it, i.e. to reduce its effect: it can be said that, when it happens, an encounter is an event.
Yet it is within a scene or an educational environment, a concrete situation not qualified for relationality alone, that the relationship is produced and - in the relationship or at the culmination of the relationship - the encounter. We can then say that the encounter happens within the framework of what could be called the situations of encounter. While it is true that the encounter is immediate, occurring where every medium has fallen, this does not detract from the fact that - before and after - there are the mediations of the encounter: first, we have the medium and the mediations through which the encounter becomes practicable; after, those that bring its effects back into the world. Here the space opens up for educational action, for a pedagogical construction of the encounter space.
In order to test this possibility, a reflection on the encounter will be developed starting with the theme of language and in particular the encounter between different worlds, as occurs in the work of translation. What do philosophical reflections on translation have to teach the educator? The educator's line of intervention cannot but always be perspectival: I cannot but see, always, in foreshortening; I must start from the assumption that a global or panoramic view is precluded to me and that therefore in my action there is always - structurally - something that escapes me, a gap. The non-adaptation between my expectations and those of others, between the meaning I attribute to a phenomenon and that intended by those involved with me in the same, between projects and effects, are irreducible aspects. Therefore - as long as we act - we are always in a regime of translatability: the right commitment to negotiation and transaction for the purpose of compensation, goes hand in hand with the awareness of the inevitability of loss, that something between one and the other, in the transition from one to the other, is inevitably lost. We can persevere, going back to doing what we can, aware that what we can do is always infinitely less than what we are called upon to do. In this sense, the model of translation - whether declined in a hermeneutic key or more driven in the valorisation of otherness - has taken hold in pedagogy as a resource for educational practice.