Professing presence / Emmerentia du Plessis

Abstract

I agree with the view of Noll (1997) and Clasquin-Johnson (2014) on what it means to be a professor, namely that being a professor is a call to action. The professor focuses on understanding, gaining insight, reflecting on the significance of knowledge, and organising knowledge in such a way that new truths come to light. The professor actively contributes to the recreation of knowledge of the subject field and acts as a catalyst between research and teaching, creating new contents. The professor focuses on, lives and breathes her area of interest. In other words: the professor professes her area of interest. This view of what it means to be a professor closely links with the spirit of presence, where a relationship is built, and from within this relationship, there is space and freedom for the truth of the care receiver, and of the care provider, to emerge. The definition of presence that is seen as the guiding theory of this inaugural lecture is as follows: Presence is “a practice where the caregiver relates her/himself to the other in an attentive and dedicated way, by doing so learns to see what is at stake for the other; from desires to fear, and, in connection with this, come to understand what could be done in this particular situation and who she/he can be for the other. What can be done is done. That is a way of doing that can only be achieved with a sense of subtlety, craftsmanship, practical wisdom and loving fidelity” (Baart & Timmerman, 2021:96). In line with the theory behind presence, namely, to slow down, listen, reflect and build relationships, and in striving to profess presence, this inaugural lecture took the form of reflective conversations with members of management, experts and post-graduate students. These conversationalists gracefully joined me in professing presence. We discussed ideas about: what is presence, what it is to be a professor who professes presence and why presence is important. In this document, the different views of conversationalists on being a professor and on presence are marked with source references for further reading and to show how the conversations resemble existing literature. Some of the source references are references to our research on presence, confirming the findings of international research on presence and showing some of the uniquely South African aspects of presence, such as that presence is integral to the caring character of nurses who live in the community where they work and know patients as if they are family.