Educational moods: Exploring the concept of classroom climate from a sensory-phenomenological perspective

Abstract

The value of sustaining an open and positive classroom climate for student’s academic and socio-emotional development is well documented in educational research. Referring to the prevailing mood or atmosphere of the classroom, the concept is meant to capture the day-to-day experiences of teachers and students on a collective rather than individual level. At the same time, the notion of ‘classroom climate’ seems to belong to a language of educational impreciseness, rendering it sometimes too vague and at other times too technical for capturing the lived and embodied meaning of classroom life. Inspired by Gert Biesta’s call for a world-centred education, the paper offers a sensory-phenomenological analysis of the concept of classroom climate by unfolding the concept in the double gesture of mapping and reconstructing. By differentiating some of the meanings of classroom climate in previous research, and by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of Stimmung and on Rita Felski’s work on mood and attunement, the paper explores what a more precise and meaningful way of speaking about classroom climate and what matters educationally in sustaining a positive classroom climate may look like. To this end, the notion of ‘educational moods’ offers semantic resources not yet considered within educational research.

Introduction

The value of sustaining an open and positive classroom climate for student’s cognitive and socio-emotional development is well documented in educational research. Referring to the prevailing mood, ambiance, or atmosphere of the classroom, the influence of different (positive or negative) classroom climates on students’ academic achievements and social-emotional wellbeing has been supported by various studies. Despite some uncertainties about cause-and-effect, a positive classroom climate can be related to increased social competences and co-operation among students, higher academic engagement and motivation to learn, and to reduced bulling, conflicts, and school dropout (Evans et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2020). In this regard, as Ian Evans et al. (2009: 135) notice, ‘the literature relating classroom climate to educational outcomes is impressive’.

At the same time, the notion of ‘classroom climate’ seems to belong to a language of educational impreciseness, rendering it sometimes too vague and at other times too technical for capturing the lived and embodied meaning of classroom life. In his book World-centred Education: A View for the Present, Gert Biesta (2022) touches upon this general deficit in educational research – i.e. the gap between lived life and the language and concepts we use to describe it – inviting educational theorists to explore the more existential and phenomenological dimensions of contemporary education. As Biesta writes (2022: vii), ‘the point of educational scholarship is not to tell educators what they should do, but to provide them with resources that may inform their educational artistry’. One such theoretical resource, I suggest, is to develop more precise and meaningful ways of speaking about classroom climate and what matters educationally in cultivating an open and positive classroom climate.

Against this background, and inspired by Biesta’s invitation, the overall aim of the paper is to offer a sensory-phenomenological analysis of the notion of classroom climate to educational research and practice, by unfolding the notion in the double gesture of mapping and reconstructing. By differentiating some of the meanings of classroom climate in previous research, and by drawing on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of Stimmung and on Rita Felski’s work on mood and affective attunement, the more precise purpose of the paper is to offer an educational language about classroom climate that takes Biesta’s (2022) call for an education that is ‘world-centred’ – rather than child-centred or curriculum-centred – seriously.

To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. In the first part, I am looking at how the concept of classroom climate emerged in educational research and how it is currently being discussed. By shifting the focus from teacher-student relationships to a world-centred outlook, I then connect the notion of classroom climate to the Arendtian idea of educational transformation as developed within the field of philosophy of education. Inspired by Biesta’s (2022) notion of world-centredness, I suggest that the idea of educational transformation calls for an affective and sensory climate in the classroom that allows teachers and students to be drawn out of themselves towards the world and what may address and ‘speak’ to them in a transformative way. In the second part of the paper, I reconstruct the concept of classroom climate as the educational process of ‘being initiated into a certain sensibility’ (Felski, 2015: 22) or pre-reflective orientation toward what discloses itself as interesting and mattering in teaching. As an educational process of sensuous and affective attunement to the teaching content, the climate of the classroom always exceeds our individual experiences and personal feelings, belonging instead to the educational environment in which it unfolds. In this sense, I suggest, different ‘educational moods’ already accompany our pedagogical interactions, attuning teachers and students to the teaching content and to different aspects of classroom life: educational moods influence the part of the teaching content the students and teachers are drawn to or distanced by, the questions they ask or leave behind, the distinctions or examples that matter to them and the ones they find insignificant. By way of conclusion, I sum up my argument, returning to the main contributions of the paper.

Before I continue, however, I want to say something about the ‘mood and method’, to use Rita Felski’s (2015) words, by which the notion of classroom climate is being reconstructed in the paper.

Mood and method: A sensory-phenomenological analysis

Questions of mood and affect have long figured in different theoretical traditions, such as in the hermeneutics of Heidegger, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of affect, and in Deleuzian affect theory. Lately, however, there has been a renewed epistemic interest among feminist theorists in the question of mood and method, specifically in relation to different reading and interpreting strategies in the field of literary studies (Mortensen, 2017). According to Felski (2015, 2020), all philosophical arguments have their own affective styles or tones. Far from being disembodied, weightless, and free-floating intellectual exercises, Felski reminds us, thinking and interpretating are embodied and sensuous practices that are deeply relational. Firstly, all intellectual work comes with a certain sensibility towards one’s object of concern, that is, with an emotional attunement or ‘affective tone’ that is transpersonal rather than personal and that makes one’s claims and arguments matter (Felski, 2015). As readers and writers of educational philosophy and research, for example, this background mood can be sensed intersubjectively in the rhythm of our thoughts, in the beat of our hearts, and in the tuning of our sentiments towards a matter of interest and concern. Secondly, Felski (2015) argues, philosophical arguments are not only a matter of theoretical content but also a matter of affect, ethos, and rhetoric. Even the most analytical approach or critical argument, according to her, are never mood-free but is one specific affective way among other of making a text’s claims and arguments matter. Thirdly, every ‘mood-of-thought’ – whether critical, affirmative, or objective – will orient us slightly differently toward the world, infusing us with ‘a certain attitude or disposition’ to the things of study (2015: 4). ‘To acknowledge the affective dimensions of argument’, Felski writes, ‘is not … to invalidate its intellectual or analytical components, but merely to acknowledge the obvious: modes of critical thought are also forms of orientation toward the world’ (Felski, 2011: 219, emphasis added).

Felski’s (2015) interest in questions of mood and method should be understood against her analysis of the humanities and social sciences, where a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ has become the dominating critical mood-of-thought. Originally coined by Paul Ricoeur, the term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ represents to her the kind of critical reading and interpretive practises that aim to expose hidden or repressed meanings in the text, thereby fostering researchers to adopt an attitude of caution, suspicion, and distrust toward the text (Felski, 2015). In contrast to a suspicious hermeneutics, Ricoeur proposes a ‘hermeneutics of trust’ which is driven by a sense of care and curation, and which interprets the text in search of a kind of pre-reflective or Heideggerian ‘world-disclosure’ (Felski, 2015). Central to Felski’s (2015) argument, hence, is not only that different reading practices represent different intellectual exercises, but that such exercises embody different scholarly sensibilities that orient the researcher toward certain aspects of the world while overlooking other aspects.

In responding to Biesta’s (2022) call for exploring the existential and phenomenological dimensions of contemporary education, I suggest, educational researchers need to engage in a wide range of ‘affective styles and modes of argument’ (Felski, 2015: 3). Against this background, the affirmative mood-of-thought that guides the present paper’s reconstruction of the notion of classroom climate, is an attentiveness towards the transformative or ‘world-disclosing’ moments in the classroom when students and teachers are allowed to see the world and their place within it with new eyes (Biesta, 2022). In contrast to a more critical reading strategies which illuminate the repressive aspects of teaching and learning, the aim of a world-centred reading strategy, I suggest, is to temporarily ‘slows down judgement in order to describe more carefully’ (Highmore, 2021: 182) what different teaching and classroom practices are like, why they matter educationally, and how they unfold in educational contexts from existential and sensory-phenomenological perspectives (Biesta, 2022; see also Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019). ¹

Besides its presence in educational research, I suggest, the concept of classroom climate is specifically interesting in this context by way of its embodied and sensuous metaphors; expressions such as ‘classroom climate’, ‘social atmosphere’, ‘learning environment’, and ‘pedagogical milieu’ all relate to the living and embodied conditions of earthly beings. While hard to measure and conceptualize, metrological and ecological conditions are often instantly sensed and recognizable when experienced intersubjectively (Evans et al., 2009). In the same way, I suggest, there is a certain directness to classroom life, a specific atmosphere or sense of belonging or flourishing (or of not belonging or withering) that is felt intuitively and intersubjectively by the ones present in the classroom, but that can be hard to put one’s finger on. The notion of classroom climate, hence, seems to offer conceptual and semantic resources not yet considered within educational research, providing teachers with a sensory-phenomenologically oriented language ‘that may inform their educational artistry’ (Biesta, 2022: vii). In this sense, the climate metaphor reminds us of something essential about education and classroom life: that teachers and students are living, breathing, and sensing beings and that education is as much a sensuous and earth-bound activity as an intellectual and cognitive endeavour.

Part I: Mapping the language of classroom climate

In educational practice, the notion of classroom climate is generally used to describe the prevailing mood, ambiance, or atmosphere that is experienced intersubjectively by the ones present in the classroom. A positive classroom climate generally feels welcoming, open, respectful, and supportive of students learning and socio-emotional development, while a negative classroom climate feels chaotic, hostile, disrespectful, and unsupportive (Evans et al., 2009; Delman, 2002). The (positive or negative) experience of a classroom climate is felt bodily and intuitively before we can put it into words; in an unsafe classroom climate, shoulders shrug, necks become tense, the berthing shallow, and bodies become unease; in a safe classroom climate, on the other hand, shoulders drop, necks become relaxed, the breathing calmer, and bodies interact more harmonious in the room. As all teachers and students know, however, a classroom is not a neutral or static space, but a dynamic environment where complex interactions occur and where different aspects of the classroom climate interact with teaching and learning (Delman, 2002). In practice, different classroom climates can range from hostile to welcoming and the affective atmosphere in the classroom can vary daily and over time. Within educational research, therefore, identifying and sustaining the positive aspects of classroom climate while reducing negative aspects has long been seen as a way of promoting students’ academic achievement and socio-emotional wellbeing, as well as to enhance school quality more generally (Wang et al., 2020).

Within educational research, the notion of classroom climate was first introduced during the 1960 and became popular in the 1970-ties by the work of psychiatrist Rudolf H. Moos (Evan et al., 2009). Initially interested in psychiatric hospital wards, Moos developed the first known classroom climate assessment scale (Classroom Environmental Scale, CES) which laid the foundation for decades of research to come (Evan et al., 2009). By focussing on shared perceptions of those present in the actual classroom setting, the aim of Moos’ studies was to capture the day-to-day experiences of teachers and students on a collective and interpersonal rather than individual and personal level. Despite some resent conceptual development, however, the notion of classroom climate remains nebulous and hard to define. One reason is that most researchers emphasize the importance of conceptualizing classroom climate as a dynamic and multidimensional phenomenon (Wang et al., 2020). In mapping the different patterns of relations that constitute ‘the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical environments in which our students learn’ (Ambrose et al., 2010: 170), most research relay on metaphorical language, refereeing to meteorological conditions, the ecosystem of living organisms, or the health conditions of biological bodies. We can find these and similar metaphors in the many quantitative questionnaires measuring students’ wellbeing by referring to ‘healthy’ or ‘toxic’ classroom climates (Evans et al., 2009; Delman, 2002) and in expressions such as ‘worming up’ or ‘cooling down’ the classroom climate to the right socio-emotional temperature for teaching and learning (see e.g. Harvey et al., 2016). As mentioned earlier, the meteorological metaphor appears to provide specific semantic force not yet explored within educational research. Like the physical climate of planet Earth, the socio-emotional climate of the classroom is characterized as perceptible and sensible, as varying between pleasant and unpleasant, as lingering for weeks or changing in an instance, and as affecting ‘everyone within its influence’ (Evans et al., 2009: 132).

Since the notion’s introduction in educational research, different analytical models have been developed to analyse the complexity and dynamics of classroom life. According to Ian Evans et al. (2009), there are at least three different dimensions of the notion of classroom climate that can be identified as interacting simultaneously: (a) an academic dimension, referring to the pedagogical and curricular elements of the teaching and learning environment; (b) a management dimension, referring to ways of maintaining structure and order during lessons, and (c) an emotional-interpersonal dimension, referring to the social and affective interactions among students and between teachers and students (see also Wang et al., 2020). While the three dimensions overlap and are hard to discriminate in practice, the emotional dimension of classroom climate remains the most tangable and yet elusive. In what follows, therefore, I have limited my argument to explore the affective and sensuous dimension of the notion of classroom climate and how such dimensions can be said to ‘set the affective scene’ for what may disclose itself as interesting and mattering in teaching (Biesta, 2022).

Despite different theoretical and empirical orientations, a common assumption within classroom emotional climate research is that academic objectives cannot be reached unless students are provided with a positive emotional climate (Nodding, 1992). Such climate generally includes teachers fostering a caring, supportive, and stimulating emotional environment where students feel they belong, can express themselves and their ideas freely, are offered emotional support when falling behind, and where the lesson or subject matter feels interesting and relevant on a personal level (see e.g. Pianta et al., 2008). Wihtin classroom climate reserach, the most common way of measuring the emotional exchange in the classroom is to use different CEC-scales (Classroom Emotional Climate) which focuses specifically on interpersonal relations among students and between teachers and students. Some studies have, additionally, focused on how teachers can develop students’ socio-emotional competences or on how teachers’ emotional labour can be cultivated in the classroom. A common question within classroom emotional climate research, hence, is how to improve the quality of the teacher-student relations (as in teacher behaviours and student responses). In fact, as Evans et al. (2009: 141) writes, ‘[t]he relationship between teacher and students in the class is the essence of the classroom emotional climate’. This focus on teacher-student interactions, however, has made the conceptualization of classroom climate as something more than interpersonal relationships to fall into oblivion in much classroom climate research. In what follows, I take his oblivion as an invitation to the reconstruction of the notion of classroom climate in a more world-centred vocabulary.

Educational transformation and world-centred education

As in the case of school effectiveness and improvement movement (SER), an often-neglected question within classroom climate research (including CEC-research) is what a good classroom climate is supposed to be good for, which has to do with the wider educational-philosophical question of the aims and purposes of education. Biesta (2015, 2022) has written extensively about this ‘blind spot’ or lack of direction in contemporary educational research. Hence, without an explicit idea of the aim of our educational endeavours, I argue, the notion of classroom climate risks becoming not just elusive but a rather ‘directionless’ concept (Biesta, 2022: vi).

In search for a world-centred orientation for classroom climate research that can direct our attention to the more existential and phenomenological conditions of classroom life, I relate the notion of classroom climate to the Arendtian idea of educational transformation as developed in the field of philosophy of education (e.g. Biesta 2022; Korsgaard, 2018; Masschelein and Simons, 2013; Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019). More specifically, I connect the notion of classroom climate to the educational process of being sensory and affectively attuned to the transformative or ‘world-disclosing’ moments when students and teachers are allowed to see the world and their place within it with new eyes. What is at stake in education, Biesta (2022) argues, is not only to make sure that students learn well and that they learn the right things so they can lead good lives and contribute to society. To be educated, Biesta (2022: viii) reminds us with reference to Richard Peters, is also ‘to travel with a different view’ that gives us an altered outlook on the world and our place within it, as well as to what the world demands from us in turn. In these and similar transformative moments in the classroom, I suggest, a specific meaning of classroom climate manifests itself and it is this pedagogical meaning that I seek to recover in the paper by reconstructing the notion of classroom climate in a more existential, sensory and ‘world-centred’ vocabulary.

What characterizes the affective atmosphere where educational transformation may occur? The most predominant focus within classroom emotional climate research, as we have seen, is to find ways to enhance the quality of the relationships between teacher and students. To make sense of Biesta’s (2022) call for a world-centred education and how it relates to the affective atmosphere of the classroom, therefore, we need to consider the current debate between the two dominating ways of theorizing the teacher-student relation in educational research. According to Biesta (2022), the debate is centred round two (seemingly) binary positions: either the relation between teacher and students is understood in traditional terms as a hierarchal interaction between one who knows (the teacher) and one who do not (yet) know (the student), or the relation is reversed in the name of progressive education by making the teacher into an instrument for supporting individual student’s different needs, interests, and talents. Biesta (2022) calls the first position curriculum-cantered education and the second child-centred education. While the curriculum-cantered position has been criticized for giving too much authority and control to the teacher, the child-centred position has been criticized for giving too much freedom and control to the students. In both cases, Biesta (2022) argues, the world itself is reduced to an object of learning and to something that we can have knowledge about and use to our own purposes. This world-reduction has made educational researchers to overlook that there is a third position that can transcend the binary logic of either teacherly control or studently freedom: the things in the world – e.g. a poem, a historical event, a mathematical principle, an optic phenomenon – that have the pedagogical authority to speak and matter to us as teachers and students in a real and transformative sense, moving us out of ourselves toward the world and what may address us (Biesta, 2022; see also Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2019). Instead of focussing on either teacher-centred or student-centred dispositions that tend to make us ask what the world can do for us (as individuals and as society), Biesta (2022) suggests, educational transformation requires a de-cantered disposition in the classroom where teachers and students are open and allow themselves to be affected and touched by the world and adjust their desires and needs to what the world asks from them. The transformative potential of Biesta’s (2022) world-centredness, hence, lies in the fact that we do not (yet) know what the world will reveal to us in teaching and how it will affect and alter us and our place within it. Hence, one of the primary teacherly gestures in the classroom, according to Biesta, is to redirect attention to what may disclose itself as interesting and mattering in teaching, inviting the students into what he calls a shared state of ‘attentive readiness’ (2022: 96). Inspired by the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, Biesta (2022) suggests, there is a kind of givenness to the world which implies that if what is shown in teaching has first to give itself in teaching, students and teachers must allow themselves to be open and affected by the world in ways they cannot always imagine or anticipate beforehand.

In the second part of the paper, I explore what such ontological openness or world affectedness could mean in relation to the concept of classroom emotional climate, before I introduce the notion of ‘educational moods’ as a way of capturing how teachers and student are always already pre-oriented and affectively attuned to the world in some way or another.

Part II: Classroom climate revisited

Why are teachers and students drawn to and affected by certain questions or aspects of the teaching content while being untouched or distanced by other aspects? Is it possible to find ways of talking about the transformative or world-disclosing force of education in existential and phenomenological terms without ignoring the transpersonal, public, and social shaping of classroom life? While the idea of pedagogical atmosphere is not new (see e.g. Bollnow, 1989), ² the focus on the affective and sensory conditions for educational transformation is largely missing in the literature. Following Felski (2020), mood and attunement are two concepts that can give us valuable insight into such questions. ‘To become attuned’ through mood, Felski writes, ‘is to be drawn into a responsive relation [to the world] – to experience an affinity that is impossible to ignore yet often hard to categorize’ (2020: 41). Felski’s statement should be understood against the backdrop of an increased interest in affect within feminist theory as well as in a renewed interest in the work of Heidegger and his account of Befindlichkeit (attunement) and Stimmung (mood) (Freeman, 2014). ³ Before turning to Felski’s own work, therefore, we need to consider Heidegger’s phenomenological understanding of affectivity and how it is part of the concrete environment in which it unfolds.

Heidegger on Stimmung

In comparison to contemporary psychological accounts of emotions, which focus on internal mental stages and inner personal feelings, Heidegger’s (1993/1927) account of Befindlichkeit (attunement) through Stimmung (mood) represents one of the fundamental modes of existence by which the world and things in the world are made present and affects us; mood colours every experience, encounter, thought, disposition, belief, and emotion that we have (Freeman, 2014). In a phenomenological sense, following Heidegger (1993/1927), human beings are not primarily defined as internal consciousness isolated from the world or other minds, but as a being that always already exist in and with the world. The way human beings exist and find themselves in the world is by being attuned to themselves, others, and the world through or even as mood. In this sense, we do not ‘have’ moods, we are in moods or are even ‘thrown into’ moods (Freeman, 2014). In a specific classroom, for example, teachers and students do not choose to feel invited, relaxed, interested, and attentive during a lesson or a classroom assignment, they already find themselves being invited, relaxed, interested, and attentive as moods discloses the way we already exist as being in and with the world. When something appears as insignificant in one moment and significant in the next during a lesson or a classroom assignment, mood is the precondition for this change of affective attunement toward the world. Moreover, for Heidegger (1993/1927), being attuned to the world through mood cannot be isolated from the immediate context or environment in which it unfolds. In this sense, moods are not personal or private but part of the specific environment (e.g. a classroom) and, hence, essentially shared and public; they are not only ‘mine’ so to speak (Freeman, 2014). Being attuned to the world through/as mood, then, is part of our ‘ontological architecture’, but also the ‘fundamental way in which the world is disclosed to and affects us’ (Freeman, 2014: 446).

A short detour to the etymological roots of the German term Stimmung can help us to illuminate the more bodily and sensory implications of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Stimmung has its original root in the human body and derives from the Old High Germen Stimme (voice) and the Old Greek stoma (mouth) (Thonhauser, 2021). During the eighteenth century, however, it became more common to use Stimmung with reference to musical instruments, as when tuning (stimmen) an instrument so that it becomes tuned (gestimmt) or retuned (umstimmt). According to Gerhard Thonhauser (2021), the transition from the body (Stimme = voice) to the tuning of musical instruments (stimmen = to attune) was also influenced by the adjective stimming which means harmonious or having the same voce. Hence, in contrast to its English and French translations (e.g., mood, attunement, atmosphere, and ambiance), the term Stimmung embody at least three different but interrelated meanings – voice/mouth, attunement, and harmony of voices. ⁴

With the psychologization and individualization of the term Stimmung in the eighteenth century, the original reference to living, breathing, and sensing bodies (voices and mouths) seems to have fallen into oblivion. When Stimmung was transferred into the fields of physology and psychology, for example, the Germen phrase ‘Stimmung des Gemüt’ (attunement of mind) became widely popular (Thonhauser, 2021). Within psychology, Stimmung first and foremost refers to an inner dispositional state of the private mind; as an individual instrument ready to be played, an attuned mind (gestimmtes Gemüt) is ready to be determined (bestimmt) in the process of being attuned by outside forces (gestimmt) or self-attuned (selbststimmt). Within physiology, likewise, ‘tuning’ an engine or a motor variceal, usually means to optimize the system’s performance (Thonhauser, 2021).

For Heidegger (1993/1927), however, Stimmung is not an internal dispositional state ready to be determined or optimized by external or internal forces, but one of the fundamental existential modes by which human beings always already find themselves resonating with the world. Being touched or ‘affected by things mattering to’ us ‘is what Heidegger calls the Stimmung of’ our ‘being-in-the-world’ (Thonhauser, 2021: 1261).

Felski on mood and attunement

Why are we as teachers and students drawn to and affected by certain questions or aspects of the world and the teaching content? Inspired by Heidegger’s work on the phenomenology of Befindlichkeit (attunement) through/as Stimmung (mood), Felski develops the idea of attunement through mood as a way of exploring the sensuous and affective attachments that shape and motivate our relations to specific objects in the world. ⁵ Moods, according to Felski (2020), are not internal occurrences in individual subjects, nor do they originate from objects in the world as such; moods attune the relation between subject and object as a whole and involves both sensuous and bodily dimensions. In this sense, moods do not mean withdrawal into interiority (as in being self-attuned) or an exposure to exteriority (as in being attuned by outside forces); mood is first and foremost about things coming together and resonating, about a coordinating of senses into a (more or less) harmonious whole (Felski, 2020). Such wordily ‘things’ include living beings and material substances as well as social and cultural discourses. As Ben Highmore (2021: 181) writes: ‘The sensual stuff of culture gets under our skin, draws us in, expands our world, fashions our consciousness, sets the tone and tempo of our responsiveness to the world around us’. In this sense, mood is like the weather: there is no mood-free or mood-less relation toward others and the world and since feeling and thinking, body and mind are intertwined, the affective, sensuous, and intellectual work of the individual subject cannot be extracted from ‘the workings of the world’ and from the concrete environment in with it unfolds (Felski, 2020).

However, in contrast to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of Stimmung, Felski’s conception of mood also implies questions of direction and orientation as well as of degree and weight (Felski, 2020). For Heidegger, Stimmung is always directionless and, hence, never orientated toward specific things in the world; it is simply the primordial mode by which Dasein finds itself resonating in and with the world (Befindlichkeit). What interest Felski (2020), in contrast, is how and to what degree specific things in the world – for example, a painting, a poem, a grammatical rule, a political event – comes to resonate with the us in a real and transformative sense. Attunement through mood, according to Felski (2020: 50), always ‘involves a distinct other’ which calls for a continuous process of ‘adjusting, recalibrating, finetuning’ or relations and attachments to different objects, issues, and matters in the world. In this context, I suggest, Biesta’s notion of a world-centred education and the idea of being addressed by the world and what it asks of us become interesting. For Felski, as for Biesta, education is not just a matter of thought, understanding, and cognition but also a matter of sensing and perceiving, ‘of getting to know and of coming to like; of learning to distinguish and discriminate; of experiencing what lies beyond the boundaries of previous experience’ (Felski, 2020: 56). In this sense, educational transformation is about (re)orientation – of the (re)making of ties to the world, of becoming attuned to what previously seemed irrelevant or uninteresting, of shaking up preferences, and of being drawn out of oneself toward towards the world and what it discloses to us as interesting and mattering (Beista, 2022).

Educational moods

What characterizes the affective landscape of a classroom climate where the teaching content comes to resonate and ‘speak to’ the students in a real and transformative way? For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on a particular aspect of Biesta’s (2022) overall argument, namely the question of how a third position between traditional teacher-centred education and progressive student-cantred-learning may look like, and, more specifically, whether the notion of classroom emotional climate can be reconstructed in a more world-centred vocabulary by introducing the notion of ‘educational moods’. Taking Arendt’s separation of the educational sphere from the political sphere and the private sphere as a point of departure, education is never just about teacher control (traditional teaching) nor just about student freedom (progressive learning), but includes a double kind of love: the ‘conservative love’ of the world (preservation: this is valuable to us, the old generation) and the ‘progressive love’ of the newness that every child bring to the world (renewal: it is up to you, the new generation, to form and enliven the world anew) (Bergdahl and Langmann, 2018). The point of education, according to this Arendtian view, is not the quality of the teacher-student relation as such (as in research on classroom emotional climate), but that children and other newcomers can come to experience the world and their place within it in a new way (Biesta, 2022). In such transformative educational moments, the pedagogical authority in the classroom does not come from the sovereignty of the teacher nor from the autonomy of the student, but from what discloses itself as interesting and mattering in teaching (Biesta, 2022; see also Vlieghe and Zamojski, 2022). This ‘mattering’ - whether epistemically, aesthetically, politically or ethically - is central to the idea of educational transformation not only through a change in knowledge and experience, but also through a change in perception of weight and value: It was because this poem was in the curriculum that I grow to love it; it was because we spent so much time on women’s liberation in class that it became a big interest of mine; it was because I suddenly understood the value of statistics that it became one of my favourite subjects. Educational transformation, then, is not just about student’s learning and the transmission of curriculum content, but also about world-disclosure - ‘about what crosses their [the students’] path, about what speaks to them, what addresses them, what is given to them … whether they were looking for it or not’ (Biesta, 2022: 9). This abundance of the world and the subject matter also holds for the teacher. Even the most knowable teacher, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski reminds us, is always ignorant in relation to some aspects of the world and the subject matter ‘and will have to publicly test her assertions against the thing itself’ in teaching (2022: 115).

Moved to the context of classroom climate research, I suggest, the notion of attunement through ‘educational moods’ captures the sensuous and affective climate in the classroom that needs to be present for such transformative encounters with world and the teaching content to happen. In this sense, educational moods constitute an important aspect of how teachers and students experience and are addressed by the teaching content and how this experience is entangled with the concrete environment in which they dwell. Moreover, the notion of educational mood seems to capture the tangable and elusive nature of the emotional dimension of the notion of classroom climate that is hard to capture but which nevertheless influences the pedagogical environment, attuning teachers and students to the subject matter and to different aspects of classroom life. For the ones present in the classroom, educational moods are sensed in the air of the lesson, the tone of the teacher, the atmosphere in the room, and in the rhetorical pitch of the curriculum. In that moment, several aspects of the sensorium are engaged: for example sound, colour, lightening, facial expressions, and movements which all align and conjure up to a specific educational mood long before we have been able to put it into words. In this sense, I suggest, different educational moods – whether positive, negative, or neutral – already accompany our pedagogical interaction, effecting how teachers and students find themselves in relation to each other and the teaching content: the parts of the subject matter they are drawn to or repelled by, the books and texts they puzzle over or leave behind, the style of argument they use or misuse, the pedagogical relations they value or find unsignificant.

In capturing the ‘affective atmosphere in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can attach to particular objects’ (Flately cited in Felski, 2020: 76), the notion of educational moods, I suggest, alerts us to two sensory-phenomenological conditions of classroom life: the world never presents itself as value-free (e.g. in terms of orientation, direction, degree, and weight), and teachers and students are already sensory and affectively pre-oriented by the classroom climate in which they find themselves. In contrast to strong (positive or negative) individual emotions about classroom life, however, educational moods are part of the general background rather than the specific foreground of the classroom. That is, educational moods always exceed our different individual experiences and preferences and are characterized by a certain degree of commonality and interpersonal prevalence. In this sense, educational moods are not primarily personal but interpersonal or even transpersonal: educational moods are ‘shared, collective and social’ and they are shaped by ‘the linguistic and cultural world into which we are thrown’ (Felski and Fraiman, 2012: vii; see also Zembylas, 2022).

Furthermore, following Biesta (2022), if education entails the process of getting to know things about the world that we did not anticipate beforehand (world-disclosure) as well as coming to care for things we did not previously care for (perception of weight and value), the difference between simply appreciating something and truly being affected and transformed by something in teaching calls for pedagogical attention. Returning to the etymological roots of the German term Stimmung, I suggest, the notion of educational moods metaphorically turns the bodies of students and teachers into instruments that collectively resonate the general tone, feel, and pace of a specific classroom climate. As when tuning instruments to create the right pitch, I suggest, the language of educational moods can help educational researchers to pay closer attention to the transformative and world-disclosing moments in teaching and to the students’ different responses in the classroom. Since the notion of educational moods implies an ontological openness and receptivity between self and the world, different students can both ‘tune in and tune out’ during a lesson or classroom assignment, and they can be more or less attuned to different matters while being in the same mood. In this sense, Felski reminds us, attunement through mood is not an affect among others, but an ontological state of affectedness, not a specific (negative or positive) feeling about the world but feeling with the world, of ‘things resonating, aligning, coming together’ (2020: 42) in certain ways rather than other, in words as well as in forms of life. This state of affectedness is both passive and active. In the educational process of sensuous and affective attunement, students and teachers are phenomenologically pre-oriented through collective and socially shaped moods in the classroom, but they are also initiating the kind of relations they want to develop with distinct objects and matters in the world (Felski, 2020).

In sum, I suggest, educational moods express themselves in shared pre-dispositions in the classroom that collectively attune our relations the subject matter and to different educational activates: With interest rather than boredom, with care rather than indifference, with trustfulness rather than suspicion, with belongingness rather than strangeness, with openness rather than hostility, or vice versa. This affective pre-orientation, however, does not mean that everyone in a classroom will feel or experience the same things. Every classroom is heterogeneous and dynamic, and the same questions and issues can be perceived differently while being in the same mood. Moreover, Felski (2020) reminds us, educational moods are always influenced by the perceptions and responses of others which makes the question of what comes from the self, the subject matter, or from the input of others difficult to distinguish in practice. In implying an oncological openness and receptivity between self and the world, hence, educational moods are not just transpersonal and part of the classroom environment in which teachers and students find themselves, but also influenced by the social and cultural world to which they belong.

Conclusion

In this paper I have taken up Biesta’s invitation to explore the existential and phenomenological dimensions of contemporary education by offering a world-centred way of speaking about classroom climate and why cultivating a positive classroom climate matter educationally. Within the field of philosophy of education, there has been a renewed interest in the reconstruction of traditional teaching strategies and study practices which acknowledge the importance of a more worldly or ‘terrestrial’ education. However, there is more going on in the classroom than teaching and studying and there are many ways of getting through a lesson, a classroom assignment, and a school day. In the same way, the climate of a classroom changes in and between lessons and during the day, making some teaching strategies and study practices possible and other not. However, there are always some moments in a classroom when students and teachers may see the world and their place within it a new light. Such transformative and world-disclosing moments, I have suggested with reference to Biesta (2022), require a classroom climate where teachers and student allow themselves to be affected and addressed by what discloses itself as interesting and mattering in teaching. A world-centred education, then, is never only about the transmission of curriculum content and students’ learning, but also about shaking up preferences, of getting to know things about the world that we did not anticipate beforehand as well as coming to care for things we did not previously care for.

In exploring what sensory-phenomenological language about classroom climate may look like, I have made the case for ‘educational mood’ as a key term for the conceptual reconstruction of classroom climate. I have motivated this turn since education enables the creation and co-creation of enduring relations to some aspects of the world (while foreshadowing other aspects) and because individual emotions about these aspects do not really capture the shared, lived, and transpersonal experiences of classroom life. The concept of classroom climate, I suggest, reminds us that education, besides being about knowledge acquisition and critical thinking, is ‘sentimental – that is, involving the sentiments’ (Felski, 2020: 127). Far from being a free-floating intellectual enterprise, the concept of classroom climate acknowledge that education is an embodied and sensuous practices that is relational and terrestrial through and through. While often hart to put into worlds, educational researchers can sense this ontological relationality in the voice and gestures of the teacher, in the moments and responses of the students, in the rhetorical pitch of the curriculum, and in the tuning of their sentiments towards certain aspects of the subject matter. Even if specific educational moods cannot be conjured up at will, as most teachers know, there are classroom arrangement that may or may not resonate with specific educational moods. Some of these arrangements, I suggest, can encourage students to become attuned – or differently attuned – to what once left them untouched or indifferent, so they (paraffining Biesta and Peters) may experience new things or see familiar things with new eyes.