From detached knowledge to embodied care: Cultivating affective contextures of collective care in sustainability education

• In Event: Climate Emotion, Agency, and Justice in Formal and Informal Settings

Abstract

Objectives. This study examines how sustainability education can meaningfully engage students’ emotions and agency amid climate and socio-environmental crisis, particularly in contexts of exclusion. It focuses on the design and enactment of a sustainability teaching unit co-developed by teachers, researchers, and local community members in Salt, an impoverished municipality in Catalonia, Spain. The unit emerged from a research-practice partnership (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017) centered on local environmental injustices, fostering collective engagement that reconfigured students’ emotional, ethical, and political relationships with both their community and curricular knowledge.

Theoretical framework. We draw on cultural-historical activity theory and critical psychological approaches to affect, particularly the concepts of affective contextures of collective care (Author & other, 2025a) and affective configurations of hope (Authors, 2025b). Emotions are not treated as internal states but as socially and historically mediated experiences arising through collective activity. We also conceptualize students as historical actors (Gutiérrez et al., 2020), capable of transforming social practices through engagement in meaningful educational ecologies.

Methods. The study is based on a two-year participant ethnography carried during the 2023-2025 period and following the collaborative development and implementation of a newly established unit on sustainability for upper secondary students (15-16 years old) at a public school categorized as highly complex. Ethnographic engagement traced pedagogical contradictions and transformations, attending to both material and emotional dimensions of the learning activity.

Data sources. Data sources focus on the first year and include audiovisual recordings of 10 co-design and planning sessions with two teachers, 3 interviews with a school principal, 8 focus group interviews with students, and recordings of 50 classes at school and learning outcomes. This record allows for monitoring the trajectory of each group of young people into the learning process. We analyzed how affective shifts and agentive stances emerged in relation to the unit’s sociomaterial organization and the broader school–community alliance.

Findings. Findings show that grounding sustainability content in local struggles—such as housing precarity and pollution—reshaped both teachers’ and students’ emotional orientations and fostered collective agency, shifting this from initial detachment and apathy towards the topic. Curricular content no longer appeared distant or abstract but became a site of shared indignation, situated care, and emergent hope. These affective configurations co-developed with new motives for learning, as students engaged in inquiry, collaboration, and critique. Emotional and ethical dimensions were not peripheral but central to how learning and agency unfolded.

Significance. This study contributes to rethinking sustainability education by highlighting how affective, ethical, and political dimensions of learning are shaped within socio-educational ecologies (Author et al., 2025b). It responds to calls for stronger theorization of emotions in climate justice education (cf. Nasir et al., 2020; Coffey et al., 2021), arguing that affective contextures of collective care are vital to developing agency in response to both local and global injustices. In line with emerging views of sustainable schooling as a collective and situated struggle over the commons, we show how curricular transformation can emerge through the everyday practices of teachers and students in underserved contexts.

Authors

• Alfredo Jornet Gil, Universitat de Girona

• Hanna Rokenes, University of Oslo

• Eliana Mercedes Bussi, University of Girona