The ideas in this piece were first shared as a keynote at the EMESER Symposium: “Educational perspectives on emotions in teaching and learning for sustainability,” hosted by the WERA Research Network on Emotions in Environmental and Sustainability Education, Utrecht, April 2025. They are shared here in a more accessible format for educators, artists, and community leaders working with complexity, collective process, and pedagogical transformation.
Introduction
We are living in a moment of unraveling. Social systems are under strain, ecosystems are collapsing, and many of us are experiencing the affective weight of these crises in our classrooms, in our institutions, and in our bodies. As educators and facilitators, the question is not whether we are teaching in times of crisis, but how we are responding to them. What kind of pedagogy is needed now? What kind of space can help us hold these conditions with care, complexity, and courage?
My argument is simple, but far-reaching: emotion is not peripheral to the learning process. It is central. If we want to cultivate educational responses that are adequate to the challenges we face, we need to stop treating emotion as something private, individual, or irrational. Emotion is relational. It arises between people, across histories, and through power. It is both shaped by and shaping of the world.
In the context of climate crisis, extinction, authoritarianism, and systemic violence, education must be able to hold not only hope, but grief, anger, numbness, and despair. These are not obstacles to learning. They are the emotional conditions through which transformation becomes possible.
Beyond the Individual: Rethinking Emotion in Education
Too often, emotion is still approached as a personal state, a kind of internal weather that belongs to the individual. Whether in theories of emotional intelligence or behavioural psychology, the underlying assumption remains the same: that emotion lives inside us and must be managed, regulated, or redirected to support learning outcomes.
This logic appears frequently in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE), where we are told to inspire hope or cultivate resilience as tools for engagement. But what happens when the real emotional tone of the room is grief or rage? What happens when numbness or disorientation is the most honest response to ecological collapse?
To work effectively in these spaces, we need a different model. Emotions do not arise in isolation. They are social, historical, and ecological. They emerge in relation—with others, with place, with power. As thinkers like Dewey (1934), Mead (1934), and Elias (1978) have long argued, affect is not a side effect of cognition. It is part of how we come to know and respond in the world.
Even in the neurosciences, this insight is becoming more visible. Antonio Damasio (1994) reminds us that rational thought depends on emotional feeling. Jaak Panksepp (1998) traces affective systems like grief and play to evolutionary structures shared across species. These findings complicate the idea of emotion as a static, internal resource. They show us something messier, more alive.
And yet even these perspectives rarely ask the harder questions: whose emotions are legitimised in learning spaces? Who is heard when they express anger? Who is asked to perform positivity or calm? These are questions not just of psychology, but of politics, of equity, and of relational ethics.
Emotion as Relational and Emergent
A more promising approach is one that treats emotion as relational, emergent, and socially situated. Emotions arise not within people, but between them. They unfold in conversation, in tension, in collective rhythm. They are co-produced in the aesthetic field of social life.
This is where pragmatist philosophy, particularly the work of Dewey and Mead, becomes helpful. For Dewey (1934), emotion is not a supplement to experience. It is how experience becomes meaningful. For Mead (1934), emotion emerges in the “conversation of gestures”—the improvisational space of mutual response.
Norbert Elias (1978) extends this idea historically, showing how emotion is patterned by the structures and norms of a given society. And complexity theorists like Stacey (2001) and Mowles (2011) show how emotional life, like all social process, is recursive, dynamic, and context-sensitive.
Together, these perspectives invite us to think of emotion not as an input or output, but as a medium of ethical presence. Emotion registers when something matters. It reveals where the relational field is dense, or strained, or charged with contradiction. In educational settings, this matters deeply.
To ignore the emotional life of a group is not to neutralise it. It is to risk reproducing power, exclusion, and silence. Affective dynamics are always at work. The only question is whether we are attuning to them.
Pedagogy as Social Sculpture
If we take emotion seriously, we have to rethink what we mean by pedagogy. Learning is not just cognitive. It is embodied, aesthetic, and collective. It happens in atmospheres. It is shaped by gesture, tone, pace, and silence.
This is where I find Joseph Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture” powerful. For Beuys (2004), every person is an artist—not because they create objects, but because they shape the social. Pedagogy, in this view, becomes a form of participatory composition. A collective artwork enacted through relation.
And if we take Beuys seriously, this is not sometimes true. It is always true. Every classroom, every seminar, every group process is already an aesthetic space. The question is not whether emotion is present. The question is what kind of emotional reality is being shaped—and for whom.
In ESE, this has urgent stakes. The emotional terrain of climate collapse is dense with grief, denial, anxiety, and hope. Students bring this with them. Teachers do too. We need pedagogical forms that can hold these affects—not resolve them, but stay with them. Not explain them away, but metabolise them together.
That is why participatory, embodied, and ritualised practices matter. A moment of shared stillness. A walk in silence. A dialogue that touches rawness. These are not soft edges. They are essential. They are what allow the world to enter.
Toward a World-Centric Pedagogy
To speak of world-centric pedagogy is to insist that education must begin with the world—not as curriculum content, but as lived relational field. It is to recognise that our learners are not abstract minds, but situated bodies entangled in complex, often painful realities.
Thinkers like bell hooks (1994) and Paulo Freire (1970/2005) have long taught that education is a site of liberation—but only if it makes room for emotion, contradiction, and struggle. Biesta (2017) reminds us that true education involves subjectification—a calling into relation with what exceeds us.
In this spirit, world-centric pedagogy does not aim for control or clarity. It does not rush toward resolution. It creates conditions for resonance. Hartmut Rosa (2019) describes resonance as a mode of being moved by something outside oneself—and being willing to respond.
That is the heart of this work. To become responsive to the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. To teach and learn in ways that stay present with difficulty. That honour silence. That welcome uncertainty.
This pedagogy is not efficient. It is not scalable. But it is necessary. Because the world does not need more mastery. It needs more response-ability. More capacity to stay in relation.
Conclusion: Staying with Emotion, Staying with the World
Emotion, when understood as relational and emergent, is not an obstacle to pedagogy. It is its ground. It is how we register what matters. It is how the world gets in.
To teach with emotional presence is not to manipulate feeling, or to encourage catharsis for its own sake. It is to create space where emotional truth can emerge. Where feeling can move, can disrupt, can reorient. Where grief, rage, and uncertainty are not banished, but welcomed as part of the learning.
This is what it means to stay with the world. To refuse abstraction. To let the learning space become a place of ethical encounter.
In a time of wicked problems, where clarity is rare and certainty is illusion, this kind of pedagogy is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It is how we prepare ourselves—not to escape the world’s complexity, but to meet it. Not to resolve its pain, but to respond with care.
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