Criticality's affective entanglements: rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education

ABSTRACT

Critical thinking is often understood as a set of tangible, transferrable and measurable skills and competencies. Yet, it is also an intensely affective experience that is complex, contingent and contextualised. Using interview, focus group and observation data conducted with 15 first-year undergraduate social science students at a UK research-intensive university, this paper explores how students negotiate the complex knowledge practices that constitute critical thinking, particularly the affects of being and becoming critical. The theoretical tools offered by Karen Barad and Sara Ahmed allow a conceptualisation of critical thinking as a complex phenomenon of socio-material and affective practices. This paper turns to Barad and Ahmed to explore the potential of their clashing theorisations for thinking through the affective territories of critical thinking. It will argue that acknowledging the way(s) critical thinking feels (as well as what it is and what it is for) opens up new imaginaries for feminist scholarship about criticality.     

On the image of hate in education: desirable emotions,learning, and the visibility of bodies in educational relations

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore how images of hate from the work of feminist, psychoanalytical educational thinkers Deborah Britzman and Alice Pitt, and from Sara Ahmed's investigation into the cultural politics of emotion, function to shift the ideal-image of pedagogically desired emotions and complicate the emotional landscape of educational relations. Analysing two counter-images, I consider the ambivalent role of hate in the pedagogical lives of teachers and students, and the ways in which hate may actually support learning and motivate a desire for pedagogy as shared world-making. In different ways, each of the counter-images explores the idea that educational relations need to be able to address hate. Yet the second counter-image leads me to question whether all the bodies involved in those relations have been taken into account.     

Emotions in the history of Latin American popular education: constructions for a thinking-feeling pedagogy

The purpose of this paper is to identify the presence of emotions in the constitution of popular education in Latin America, thus contributing to understand popular education as a thinking-feeling practice. It starts from the assumption that emotions are also historical and cultural expressions that mark societies and their understanding of education. In the chronicles of Guaman Poma de Ayala, one can see signs of the resistance to the conquest and of the ambivalence that characterizes coloniality; in Juana Inés de la Cruz, one hears the voice of a woman who breaks the silence; in Paulo Freire, lovingness and indignation are constitutive elements of his liberating pedagogy. In history, some emotions, such as honour, lose their strength or have their meaning changed; others, such as solidarity and insurgency, appear as possibilities of transformation in new times. The study attempts to contribute to the understanding of the complex relation between rationality and emotions in education.     

The force of habit: channelling young bodies at alternative education spaces

This article develops a novel conceptual framework for examining the (re)formulation of habits in education spaces. It is based on the premise that education spaces are key sites for channelling and intervening in children’s habits, to various ends. The article focuses on the ways educators at alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom seek to (re)formulate children’s habits. In some cases, they do so to combat social exclusion, dealing with some of the most vulnerable children in the UK’s educational system. Drawing on the habit-theories of Ravaisson and Dewey, and commensurate post-human, more-than-social approaches to childhood, the article proposes a two-fold conceptualisation of habit: as ‘(re)calibration’ and as ‘contagion’. The article draws on empirical examples taken from 10 years’ research across 59 alternative education spaces in the United Kingdom. Developing recent educational scholarship on bodies, emotions and affects, it develops an expanded, post-human notion of ‘collective’ habits that might offer a conceptual language for challenging and imagining alternatives to the perceived problems of the neoliberal educational mainstream. However, the article closes by posing some critical questions for further scholarship about why educators might specifically choose to intervene into children’s habits – not least in terms of inclusion and social justice.     

Religions and the history of education: a historiography

This article provides a study of scholarship on religions and education, published over the past forty years, in History of Education. It also includes reference to other publications, attempting a thematic analysis that scrutinises work on missionaries, churchmen, convents, charitable societies, denominations and education. Methodologies and sources are also examined, and areas for further research are identified.     

The history of secondary education in History of Education

History of Education has published a steady stream of papers on the history of secondary education over the first 40 years of its existence. This corpus of research has been generated in the context of renewed interest in the history of secondary education that has been stimulated by developments in social and historical inquiry as well as by the contemporary onset of intensive reform of secondary education in many countries. History of Education has made a distinguished contribution to this new literature, especially in relation to an understanding of the secondary school curriculum, elite forms of secondary education, and increasingly in relation to secondary education for girls and secondary education policy. Some other key themes and topics have been generally less to the fore and require further detailed investigation.     

核心情绪：探究情绪与认知关系的新视角

核心情绪是把外部信息转化为内部表征的心理机制,由机体神经生理状态和躯体内脏状态组成的连续不断的心理流,以此为视角重新审视情绪与认知的关系。在论述核心情绪的渊源、概念及神经机制后,继续阐明核心情绪的认知功能,为探讨情绪与认知的关系奠定基础。最后得出,情绪和认知仅是大脑机制在功能上的心理表现差异,本质都是对外部信息在图式上进行加工,二者是一种动态交互作用,且情绪图式是对这种动态交互作用的最佳诠释。     

Happy objects,happy men? Affect and materiality in vocational training

This article investigates the prevailing social inertia of vocational training. Previous research indicates that gendered social norms contribute to sustaining gender segregation. Few studies, however, have paid attention to how the interplay of emotional and material factors impact on gender norms in vocational training. The article builds on an ethnographic study in a Swedish upper-secondary educational programme traditionally dominated by masculinity norms, namely the Building and Construction programme. Employing Sara Ahmed's notion of happy objects, the article centres on vocational students' expressed joy in the practical work and shows how joy contributes to sustaining and challenging dominant masculinity patterns. Though students enjoyed practical work, the study indicates that a particular version of happiness was normalised which ruled out non-heterosexual and female students. The article suggests that further studies of social inertia in vocational training need to account for the interconnectedness of the emotional, material, and corporeal dimensions of gender.     

情绪的空间性

情绪的理解和表达与身体的空间结构有很多对应的地方,这些空间结构包括＂方向＂＂上下＂和＂深度＂等,将身体纳入到认知研究范畴中的＂具身＂观念同样也论证了情绪具有空间性,情绪的空间性是通过身体表现出来的。     

Tracing radical working-class education: praxis and historical representation

Growing collections of social and educational history chronicle the many instances of educational agency that lie outside institutional narratives. Renewing and developing historical understanding, these histories raise important methodological questions surrounding historical representation. Addressing such questions, this paper develops the methodological notion of praxis as a means to trace genealogies of radical working-class educational agency. It is concerned primarily with the possibility of history to create understanding across temporality, and with the place of theory in histories that mobilise conceptual terms of reference, such as class. Reflecting on research undertaken on the temporally and culturally distinct Socialist Sunday Schools and Black Saturday Schools, the discussion begins by considering the academic representation of working-class communities. Following from this, analyses of Marx, Foucault and Ricoeur inform the conceptual development of praxis. The paper concludes by reflecting on the use of community-based testimony in constructing genealogies of radical working-class education.     

The uses of affect in education: Chilean government policies

This article draws attention to the uses of affect to produce specific subjectivities and moralities in educational policies. It highlights the connections between specific ideas of the educated subject, the family role presented in governmental educational policies in Chile, and the ways these ideas are linked to the subjectivities and communities which the market requires to function. My argument is that with different intensities, affect regulation has become a strategic component of a government that articulates the relation between ‘right ways to behave at home’ and ‘school success’. As a result, affect makes conservative cultural dispositions look natural. I use discourse analysis to show how these policies use affect to control and monitor behaviors and personal relations, as well circulating cultural logics and ideological structures. I analyze one particular document to show how affect does not work through meanings per se; rather, it circulates productive ideas of families, students' behaviors, and social and cultural frames to organize a ‘good life’.     

T恤中的审美情感

T恤作为一种休闲服饰,在现代审美生活中扮演着重要角色,透过小小T恤,能使我们深刻感悟到承载在它身上的特殊情感及不同时代人们的审美追求和审美文化。T恤作为一种产品,从对服装的纯粹的经济行为、实用价值的关切到对文化内涵、审美功能的重视,不能不说是一种历史的进步。它那与生俱来的朴素风格、休闲雅致的情感、自由随意的品位对人们的审美方向起着积极的向导作用,它通过动态的、潜移默化的文化渗透,重新演绎崭新意义的生活,也在改造现代人的生活态度和审美理想。     

The contested design of children’s sexual education: queer growth and epistemic uncertainty

In this article, I contend that underneath the 2015 sex-ed debates in Ontario are deep-seated, psycho-socially entrenched problems related to thinking about childhood sexuality. I consider how the topic of sex-ed for children, over and above its actual curricular lessons, is marshaled to accomplish the work of the adult’s psycho-social needs. Methodologically, queer theory and psychoanalytic theories of childhood development are employed for their capacity to place sexuality at the origin of subjectivity. I develop a queer theory of childhood that can provide insight into the transferential attachments adults have to the paradigm of childhood innocence. I also argue that attention to how the figure of the child becomes known and contested through local and transnational exchange can help reveal the impact that sex-ed debates have on racialized and provincial imaginaries of belonging.     

以人为本在高校思想政治教育中的应用

以人为本是构建社会主义和谐社会的最终价值取向。在高校中,坚持以人为本就是要落实以学生为本,这是以人为本在高校思想政治工作中的具体体现,也是新时期高等学校思想政治教育的正确价值取向、目标选择和实现路径。高等学校思想政治教育“以学生为本”,就是要根据大学生身心发展特点,培养其健康人格,让所有学生得到全面、和谐、健康、主动的发展。     

以人为本在高校思想政治教育中的应用

以人为本是构建社会主义和谐社会的最终价值取向。在高校中,坚持以人为本就是要落实以学生为本,这是以人为本在高校思想政治工作中的具体体现,也是新时期高等学校思想政治教育的正确价值取向、目标选择和实现路径。高等学校思想政治教育"以学生为本",就是要根据大学生身心发展特点,培养其健康人格,让所有学生得到全面、和谐、健康、主动的发展。     

略论马克思主义唯物史观与历史学的理论

历史唯物主义是指导历史学研究的基本理论,但又不能代替历史学自身的理论,历史学的理论包括历史理论和史学理论,唯物史观与历史理论和史学理论既有区别又有联系。探讨二者的区别与联系,有助于我们更好地发挥唯物史观对历史研究的指导作用。     

Bodies and affect in non-traditional learning spaces

Abstract

This paper considers the ‘knowledge economy’ as it is used in education rhetoric to establish social and educational consent for significant changes both to the spatial organisation of classrooms and their affective economies. We draw on ethnographic data from a study of ‘non-traditional classroom spaces’, where the spatial organisation of schooling emerged as a potential fulcrum through which the imaginary of the conventional primary classroom was being reconceptualised. Traditionally configured classroom spaces and the learning that takes place within them were being challenged and replaced by notions of twenty-first century learning in ‘agile’ learning environments. In the context of this reform agenda, these open-plan spaces were seen as offering new prospects for participation in a globally connected and competitive economic world that requires students to continuously adapt, innovate and respond creatively to a range of different problems. We consider how these everyday moments function as conceptual encounters between affective, embodied experiences and educational reform discourses that rationalise the implementation of non-traditional classroom spaces in ways that have very little to do with children and their futures. This cultural approach takes a step aside from numerous, and necessary, critiques of recent educational policies per se, in order to consider what might be learned from the uncanny spectres of child bodies that haunt them. The paper draws attention to examples of children’s affect in non-traditional classrooms and what that may tell us about current educational reform when sacrifice forms part of the missing account of educational reorganisation for the knowledge economy.     

Emotions in medical education: Examining the validity of the Medical Emotion Scale (MES) across authentic medical learning environments

To advance emotion research in education, there is a need to develop practical and context-relevant measures of emotion and to test the applicability of emotion theories using these measures. In two studies, we examined validity evidence of a self-report scale (the Medical Emotion Scale, MES) designed to measure the unique range of emotions activated within medical education. In Study 1, we administered the MES and conducted interviews with medical trainees (N = 15). Content analysis of interviews demonstrated that the MES captured an appropriate range of emotions and that there was alignment between scale responses and interview responses. In Study 2, we measured medical trainees' (N = 60) emotions using the MES for three learning environments. Results from principal components analysis revealed a structure of emotions according to valence (negative, positive) and novelty. The findings have implications for the measurement of emotions within technology-rich learning environments and beyond.     

化学教学中情感教育的设计

教学设计是运用系统的观念和方法 ,通过教学策划和评价等阶段创建一个符合目标的教学系统 ,用以解决教学问题 ,完成教学任务。在科学教学中进行情感教育的设计 ,是教学设计中必不可少的部分。我们以化学教学中情感教育的设计为例做了一些尝试 ,以抛砖引玉。1　情感教育的目标设计情感作为非智力因素的重要组成部分 ,是人们对客观事物的态度体验。这种体验是人们对现实的一种特殊反映 ,它由客观事物是否能满足人的需要而产生。情感教育的目的是使学生产生肯定的情感体验 ,消除否定的情感体验 ,形成健全的人格 ,从而对学习、对人的全面发展产…     

The history of the future and the shifting forms of education

Abstract

Across the globe, education has recently been through a major semantic shift, where new notions such as ‘learning’, ‘competences’, ‘projects’ came to replace or complement an older, more established, educational vocabulary. The political approach to education has also evolved, as many authors have underlined, from established national forms of governing to global, transnational forms of governance. These evolutions, often abbreviated to shifts ‘from teaching to learning’ and ‘from governing to governance’ have resonated globally and attracted the attention of researchers. Most sociological accounts of such evolutions attribute them to the development and primacy of a preponderant logic, generally politics/power, culture or the economy. Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, on which we draw in this article, suggests to start from a different, opposite, premise: not the predominance but instead the lack of any predominant logic characterizes modernity. The functional differentiation of modern society into a multiplicity of—specific yet universal—systems should therefore be the pivotal point that helps make sense of these transformations. We argue that the very coexistence of such systems, their simultaneous and therefore uncoordinated existences, increases the complexity of the social world tremendously and leaves them with an uncertain future. The so-called turns to governance and to learning, we argue, should be understood, respectively, as political and educational attempts to deal with this loss of direction.