QAHE Insights

Mg. José Uyehara – University Lecturer and Student Wellbeing Coordinator
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Perú)

It happened to me in 2021. It was my third semester teaching Professional Ethics in a social sciences faculty. The pandemic had returned us to classrooms with masks, distance, and a strange formality. Students arrived, sat down, took notes, left. I fulfilled my duty: content, assessments, rubrics. Everything correct. Everything empty.

One Thursday in May, the power went out on campus. The generator took time to kick in. We had two options: suspend or wait. We decided to wait. At first there was uncomfortable silence, then murmurs, then —a miracle— conversation. Someone asked why they had chosen that career. Another answered they didn’t know, that their parents had insisted. A third said she wanted to “change the world,” but no longer knew which world or how to change it. When the lights returned, nobody wanted to get up. The class had lasted twenty minutes longer than scheduled. It was the best session of the semester.

That day I understood something that Dasbien Theory had already formulated, but which I hadn’t known how to name: the Zone of Balanced Interaction (ZIE) is not measured in transmitted content, but in quality of encounter. And in most of our classrooms, that encounter is in the red.

The diagnosis: university as transit, not as formative journey

Peruvian higher education has optimized processes to the point of anesthesia. We have management platforms, virtual classrooms, terminal efficiency metrics. But we have stopped asking ourselves what happens in the relationship between teacher and student. Paulo Freire, decades ago, already warned: banking education —where the teacher deposits knowledge into the empty student— is symbolic violence. Not because knowledge is bad, but because it does not ask what the other needs. It assumes.

In my faculty back then, we assumed. We assumed the social work student wanted to become a project manager. That the sociology student wanted to do research. That the psychology student wanted to do therapy. We rarely asked: “And you, what do you want to do with this in your specific life?”

bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, narrates how her black teachers in the segregated South of the United States taught “with the desire to share, with the desire to stimulate enthusiasm,” while in universities “enthusiasm, the joy of teaching was not even considered.” Entering the classroom with that desire, says hooks, “was an act of transgression.” I did not transgress. I fulfilled the syllabus.

The case of Ana: from silent dropout to pedagogical ZIE

Let’s return to that Thursday in May. Among those who spoke was Ana, a student who had stopped attending for three weeks. She had the worst grades in the course. She didn’t participate, didn’t submit assignments, was about to drop out. But in the darkness she spoke: she wanted to work with rural communities, but was afraid of “not being enough,” and the university seemed like a place where “everyone already knows, except her.”

I invited her to talk after class. Not as a coordinator who reprimands, but as someone who subjectivizes: “What do you need from this career? Not to pass, for your life.”

She told me about her grandmother, a healer in Ayacucho, how she had seen NGO technicians arrive with surveys and leave with “data” that never returned. She had chosen social work to “do it differently,” but the courses seemed to prepare her for the same: arrive, extract, leave.

I proposed a deal: she would do her classwork, but adapted. Instead of analyzing cases from bibliography, she would analyze her own family experience. Instead of drafting standard reports, she would write a letter to her grandmother explaining what she was learning and asking what was missing. She accepted. Her punctuality didn’t improve. But she started bringing questions that others didn’t dare ask. By the end of the semester, her grade was 13 —not brilliant— but she had produced a text that her grandmother read aloud to the community.

That is pedagogical ZIE: a relationship where the teacher subjectivizes (finds out what the student needs), intends (designs adjusted strategy), and feeds back (verifies that learning arrives as care). Ana didn’t need more content. She needed content to connect with her life.

The university as a network of invisible encounters

The problem is not that there is no ZIE in universities. It’s that it is fragmented, invisible, not institutionalized. In that same faculty, I later discovered: a methodology professor who adapted instruments to her students’ realities. A librarian who kept specific texts for those who asked “for real.” A group of students who met to study not to pass, but to “finally understand.” Cares that worked, but isolated. Without institutional feedback, without possibility of replication.

The university, in Dasbienian terms, had punctual subjectivization, individual intentionality, null feedback. Each teacher who cared did so despite the system, not thanks to it.

This contrasts with what Dasbien Theory proposes for organizations: sustained ZIE requires that care be named, connected, amplified. It is not enough that it exists. It must be visible to expand.

Proposal: three changes for university management

I do not propose abandoning competency-based assessment. I propose complementing it with assessment of the pedagogical relationship as an autonomous dimension.

First: the subjectivization interview

At the beginning of each semester, the teacher dedicates a session to asking, individually or in groups: “What do you want to do with this in your lives? Not in abstract, in concrete terms.”

It is not therapy. It is pedagogical diagnosis. The teacher needs to know whether they are teaching future field managers, researchers, activists, or those seeking economic stability. Each profile requires different intentionality. As Martha Nussbaum notes, education of the emotions is a valuable instrument for developing a democratic valuational background, but it requires “probing the possibilities for the educability of the emotions” from the concrete reality of the student.

Second: adjusted intentionality

The syllabus should not be immutable. It should have flexibility zones where the teacher, having subjectivized, adjusts. Concrete examples:

• In social work: allow the student to analyze cases from their own community, not just UN studies.
• In sociology: make the final project the systematization of a family experience, not a fictional case.
• In psychology: make the interview practice with someone from their network, not only with assigned patients.

This generates costs: more teacher time, more risk, less control. But it generates ZIE: the student receives care adjusted to their need, not generic. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, distinguished between the “I-It” relationship (where the other is object of use) and “I-Thou” (where the other is presence that completes me). The university privileges pedagogical “I-It”: the student as information receiver. ZIE demands “I-Thou”: the student as presence that also transforms the teacher.

Third: systematic feedback

At mid-semester, the teacher asks explicitly: “Is this serving you? What is it serving you for? What would you need to be different?”

And adjusts. Not always, not in everything, but in something. The student sees that their perception matters, that the relationship is negotiable, that care is verified, not assumed.

Current satisfaction surveys arrive late (at the end of the semester) and are unidirectional. Dasbienian feedback is early and dialogical: it allows correcting the trajectory, not just evaluating it. Erich Fromm, in The Fear of Freedom, warned that education often leads to “the elimination of spontaneity and the substitution of original psychic acts by emotions, thoughts, and desires imposed from outside.” Early feedback is an antidote: it returns to the student the capacity to say “this doesn’t serve me,” and to the teacher the obligation to listen.

Honest limits

Not everything is ZIE. There is knowledge the student doesn’t know they need and the teacher must impose: theoretical foundations, rigorous methodologies, professional ethics. Subjectivization doesn’t mean accepting any objective, but understanding it in order to orient it.

Neither is feedback absolute democracy. The teacher has expertise the student doesn’t have. ZIE is not “doing what the student asks.” It is negotiating educational wellbeing, where both parties learn to adjust expectations.

There are students, like Ana at the beginning, who don’t know what they want. Subjectivization with them requires patience, open questions, time. It is not efficient. But it is effective in the long term: the student who finds meaning remains, the one who doesn’t leaves or stays empty.

To apply today: ZIE-teacher checklist

Table

Moment	Dasbien Question	Concrete Action
Beginning of semester	Did you subjectivize?	Interview or survey about students’ life projects
Class design	Did you adjust intention?	At least 30% of content connected to students’ specific realities
Mid-semester	Did you feedback?	Explicit question about perceived usefulness and course correction
End	Did you verify wellbeing?	Assessment not only of learned content, but of perceived transformation

References

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2010). Das Bien. Fondo Editorial UNMSM.

Figueroa Cárdenas, A. K. (2025). Theory of Dasbien Life. Editorial Tecnologías Dasbien.

Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogía del oprimido. Siglo XXI.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Buber, M. (1923). Ich und Du [I and Thou]. Herder.

Fromm, E. (1941). The Fear of Freedom. Routledge.

Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

Modzelewski, H. (2014). Self-reflection and education of the emotions for democracy. Interview with Martha Nussbaum. Areté, 26(2), 315–333.

Biografía del autor

José Uyehara es docente universitario, investigador y asesor en gestión educativa. Ha trabajado como psicólogo y capacitador del Magisterio Peruano; además de directivo del Colegio de Psicólogos del Perú. Ha trabajado en universidades públicas y privadas del Perú en la implementación de prácticas pedagógicas centradas en la relación. Actual Director General de la Fundación To Give Welfare – DASBIEN.