Conference Agenda

The importance of sustaining an open and supportive classroom environment for students' academic achievements and socio-emotional development is well documented in educational research. Relying on ecological and metrological metaphors, classroom environment is generally defined as the climate, atmosphere, ambiance, or prevailing mood that is experienced directly and intuitively when we are in a classroom. Much like the natural environment of the planet, the pedagogical and socio-emotional environment of the classroom is characterized as perceptible, lingering, and as affecting ‘everyone within its influence’ (Evans et al., 2009, 4).

As most teachers known, however, cultivating an environment that is both open and supportive when addressing difficult ethical and existential issues in the classroom is not an easy task. One of the most difficult issues to address in education today is the climate crisis and the planetarian situation we are in. Since the climate crisis is also an existential crisis, education for sustainable development (ESD) inevitably includes questions of loss and nonexistence, such as the uninhabitability of the planet, the potential extinction of humanity, the loss of biodiversity, the abandonment of our current ways of living (in the wealthier parts of the world), and the loss of hopes and dreams in face of an uncertain future. Moreover, research studies indicate that worry is one of the main emotions related to climate change, and that negative feelings of pessimism and hopelessness are common, especially among children and young people. At the same time, there seems to be a growing indifference to sustainability issues in the public sphere. While a language of crisis and emergency is used to emphasize the seriousness of the situation, the public concern of climate change has been declining in many countries, including the European ones (Stoknes). Hence, far from being a neutral educational space, the ESD-classroom is a dynamic pedagogical environment that accommodates different and conflicting emotions, ideas, and imaginaries about our present situation. As educational researchers, we can ignore or try to overcome this dissonance, but we cannot deny its influence on educational practice.

Against this background, the overall aim of the paper is to offer a way of analyzing the 'relational landscape' that constitutes the microcosmos of the pedagogical and socio-emotional environment of the ESD-classroom. Drawing on feminist theory of embodiment and the growing field of sensory-phenomenological studies (Todd), the more precise purpose of the paper is to offer an educational language about open and supportive classroom environments that takes the existential, affective, and embodied (rather than psychological, emotional, and cognitive) dimensions of education for sustainable development seriously.

In this presentation I examine the possibilities that Foucault’s notion of parrēsia offers to educational theory in addressing the tension between individuation and enculturation. The presentation starts by offering a Foucauldian critique of the enduringly valuable liberal aims of education, particularly as developed by John Dewey in Democracy and Education. Through the use and application of Foucault’s often misapprehended illiberal lens,¹ I aim to demonstrate how overtly liberal frameworks, such as those proposed by Dewey, lack a theory of power. This deficiency inadvertently grants concessions to the social body to impose its unwarranted architectonic principles of being in the world over subjects, diagramming the way they are to experience and interact with the world they have at hand. Subsequently I will turn to Foucault's later works,²³⁴ in which he presents us with a more pronounced, yet consistently cautiously liberal stance. I will argue that the notion of parrēsia which he develops therein could offer valuable insights for educational theory, addressing the limitation inherent in Dewey’s idealist framework, and providing a more nuanced approach to cultivating critical subjects who are socially responsible citizens.

Dewey conceives the human being as inherently social. In an almost poetic manner, he depicts the interdependence between the development of a community over time and that of the individual members. These individuals engage in its growth by absorbing what society would have presented them with and subsequently contributing to its development by critically and/or creatively using that knowledge to progress its evolution, simultaneously growing in their own right. Dewey is of the opinion that democracy, by which he means a genuine openness for every member to contribute critically and creatively to the communal knowledge of the group under the scrutiny of its fellow members, is key for the continuous growth of that very group, and that schooling institutions ought to be areas for such democratic processes. While Dewey accurately recognises the social nature of human beings, he errs in rendering the social evolution akin to biological evolution, and the subsequent reverence to an idealistic democracy that is meant to protect this trajectory. This error blindsides Dewey from acknowledging that unlike Darwinian evolution, the evolutionary trajectory of the social body of knowledge, and the logic it makes possible, is affected by power pressures that derail its evolution to territories of its own dictates.⁵ From this lens, Dewey’s call to become “robust trustees”⁶ of the “achievements” of the group which in turn provide us with a guide as to how we experience the world, becomes naïve at best, or outright dangerous at worst.

While the critique above which draws heavily from Foucault may be suggestive of fatalism as well as epistemological relativism, in his later works, Foucault draws up the concept of parrēsia which offers a path to creative, critical, and agentic selves who can challenge the power structures that his earlier works sought to expose. Interestingly, this sense of agency which Foucault deems possible precisely through a practice that runs counter to the handmaiden of relativism and that is the practice of rhetoric, and this counter practice is frank speech. In this context, agency however is not inherent in our very existence but something that we must actively pursue and develop, thus rather that “robust trustees” agency would require us to be “both […] partner[s] and adversar[ies] of the arts of governing.”⁷ In this presentation I contend that the notion of parrēsia can help transform the theory and practice of schooling education into a tool that fosters healthier individual-society interaction that can better address social, political, and economic uncertainties than liberal frameworks like that of Dewey’s ever could.