28.075 - Feminist Affect Theory and Education: The Cruel, Complex (and Politically Inflected) Emotions of Teaching Today

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

To be a public school teacher today is an experience fraught with complicated affective realities. This session represents an effort to understand both the complexity and the “cruelty” (Berlant, 2010) of teachers’ lived experience through the lens of specifically feminist affect theory. In line with the conference theme, we consider the central but often masked role of affect in the competing narratives that constitute research in a culture that aspires to be democratic. Four philosophers of education working in this relatively new but increasingly influential domain take up different dimensions of teachers’ experience while a fifth philosopher of education -- who has recently published extensively with respect to teachers’ work and their affective responses to it and in it – responds.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Philosophical Studies in Education

Cosponsor

• Division K - Teaching and Teacher Education / Division K - Section 03: Teachers’ and Teacher Educators’ Lives: Lived Experiences, Identities, Socialization and Development

Chair

• Doris A. Santoro, Bowdoin College

Participant

• Polina Kukar, University of Toronto

Papers

• The Cruelty of Empathy in Teacher Education - Grace A. Chen, Vanderbilt University

• Can Courage Be Cruel? Finding Courage in the Situated Practice of Teaching - Barbara S. Stengel, Vanderbilt University

• The Double-Edged Sword of Happiness - Liz Jackson, University of Hong Kong

• Empathy in Education: Sticky Ideas and a Constellation of Promises - Polina Kukar, University of Toronto

Discussant

• Megan Boler, University of Toronto