This article maps out a problem that is tied to the dominant ideal of reflection in the discourse on teacher education: the reflecting subject is meant to adapt a distant observer’s point of view and objectify the reflected pedagogical experience as a given reality. This ideal is connected to a representationalist idea of research in which a personal relation to the object of interest is to be suspended. We consider this ideal insensitive for dealing with pedagogical experiences which are constituted by the subject’s involvement. Answering to that problem, we try to discuss to what extent phenomenological and new materialist impulses may help to reconnect research to a multitude of realities and thus to readjust the term of reflection in an ethical way.