In recent days, I have been involved in certification panels, in which students presented their work and met the examiners’ requests for conceptual depth. I chaired many of them.

My internal proposal was to promote a dialogic field in which the person felt very much at ease sharing their knowledge and practices. To my joy, my partners were also excited about that same purpose and we went on, marveling, pragmatically perceiving the powerful impact of affection on the act of learning.

Perceiving the validating gaze and the real interest in their journeys, each student can shine, without fear and without embarrassment, and, perhaps most relevant, can show the different aspects of theories and practices according to their own frame of reference.

In the end, all of us learn. Including from this (still) revolutionary action that is cooperative coexistence.

Learning is relational. Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) emphasized, among other very relevant proposals, the importance of affectivity in social relations in the classroom. A proposal so frightening that the work of the young psychologist was banned in his country, the Soviet Union, by censorship of the Stalinist regime. Vygotsky was ignored in the West for decades, and his work was published in Brazil half a century after his death.

Vygotsky’s idea is to provide a collaborative environment that enables the free exchange of ideas and the construction of knowledge also through lateral interactions. Symmetrical dialogue with the teacher is part of the process. And the teacher’s central role is that of mediator and facilitator of interactions.

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) bets on dialogic fields in which everyone collaborates in building knowledge. In this proposal, which honors the ethic of symmetry, teachers and students, with their respective qualified frames of reference, take an active part in building knowledge.

At this moment, I think of the many masters who inspired my practice as a facilitator of learning. And to them I bow. The two cited above, revolutionary through humanism, frightened, each in their own time, those who wished to block the learning of thinking.

It is dangerous to think. It is liberating to think. And all of us humans have the liberating vocation to think.

From the point of view of those who want to control, freedom is far too dangerous, because the world needs to be in the image and likeness of the powerful (pseudo-powerful, better said). In this scenario, what matters is what was decided to matter, what exists is what was decided to exist and one thinks only what was permitted to be thought. But there is a different path.

What I watch, take part in and celebrate is the expansion of the students’ frames of reference and of my own frame of reference, in a welcoming environment in which affective and emotional bonds are welcome.

In our interactions, knowledge is built and shared by the group. I see students carry out actions that follow from learning and, from these experiences, expand their capacity to think.

The affective-emotional bond is generated from memories and intersubjective experiences and is in constant expansion. The behaviors, values and feelings observed and qualified during learning events allow perception of the impacts on others and on themselves, which can lead to precious elaborations.

We can change by living together, we can learn in coexistence. We can expand our capacities in cooperative relationships and we can shrink absurdly to fit into relationships of abuse of power. It seems a simple, objective, direct choice. But it is not. I know it is complicated to shed the different layers acquired in different command-and-control environments.

My proposal today is this: try cooperative dialogue. Children, students, collaborators, partners, friends, loves, all expand in this flow.

Small revolutionary experiences build bridges of affectivity that, once consolidated, allow the traffic of the greatest of revolutions: learning through love.