This paper aims to value the educational ideas of chilean thinker Valentín Letelier (1852-1919) , with a critical view on the state of art of the notion of didactic event. First of all, we take a look at the historical framework that Letelier produced his main pedagogical text: Filosofía de la educación (1892). From this and other texts I outline the main features of his pedagogical discourse from a didactic standpoint. Then, I see it in relation to the problem of constituting pedagogy of development. I will constantly focus on Letelier’s exercise of theoretic resistance, sometimes intentional, others unintentional, to metropolitan discourses. Benefited from Said's (2001) and Jorge Medina’s (2006) ideas about resistance, I search for his didactic positions which are legible in reinscriptions and reintegrations of european discourse and its fissures, as well as in interventions and allegoric interferences. His debts with, and tributes to, his metropolitan referents are referred to as well. From this perspective, the thought of Letelier is considered as a way of resistance to think more authentic sociocultural configurations of the didactic event than those in the existing contemporary theoretical consensus of object centered didactics.
Valentín Letelier; didactic event; didactics; development; emancipation