Theorising a critical relational pedagogy for the future university

The paper moves from a critique to outcome-based university models, such as constructive alignment, which reduce teachers’ imagination and foster market-oriented values. From this analysis, the paper theorizes an alternative pedagogy for the future university, based on a critical relational approach. This theoretical exercise can provide us with insights on teaching and learning, which are especially relevant since the pandemic breakdown, when digital technologies have started to be used as surrogates of face-to-face lessons in universities worldwide. Imagining the future of hybrid university inspires counter-dominant discourses based on different ontological assumptions and alternative scenarios. Drawing on literature that seeks to define a political ontology for the common good, our proposal is to consider critical relational pedagogy as a process of knowledge enactment, related to uncertainty, and aiming at creating university teachers’ empowerment. Ultimately, it relates teaching with different ways of being and gives space to variety and imagination.