Conference Agenda

The research question is:
How and under what conditions do processes of resonance emerge as lived moments in classroom teaching, and how are they perceived, interpreted, and shaped in teachers’ pedagogical practice?

Introduction, Relevance, Research Gap, and State of Research

School is increasingly shaped by processes of acceleration, standardization, and performance orientation that characterize educational systems across Europe. Against this background, pedagogical approaches that foreground relational quality, meaning-making, and lived experience are gaining renewed relevance. Resonance pedagogy, grounded in the resonance theory of Hartmut Rosa (2016, 2019), conceptualizes education as a relational process characterized by mutual responsiveness, openness, and meaningful engagement between teachers, students, and the world.

This study investigates how resonance relationships are created, experienced, and disrupted in everyday classroom practice in primary schools. Focusing on teachers’ perspectives, it explores how resonance pedagogy becomes visible in pedagogical action and how teachers interpret and shape moments of resonance in their professional practice. Rather than examining specific instructional techniques, the study emphasizes relational dynamics, experiential dimensions of teaching, and conditions that enable or hinder resonant educational encounters.

The relevance of this topic lies in a growing body of European and international research demonstrating the importance of teacher–student relationships for learning, motivation, and well-being, particularly in contexts marked by institutional pressure and cultural heterogeneity. Resonance pedagogy offers a theoretically grounded counter-perspective to instrumental and outcome-driven models of education by emphasizing relational depth, responsiveness, and experiences of meaning. While resonance theory has gained considerable attention in educational discourse across Europe, empirical studies examining resonance pedagogy in classroom practice remain limited.

Existing contributions are predominantly theoretical or normative and provide little insight into how resonance is lived, negotiated, and interpreted by teachers in everyday school contexts. Consequently, resonance pedagogy lacks sufficient empirical grounding to inform teacher education and professional development at a European level. Addressing this gap, the present study employs qualitative interviews, research diaries, and participatory classroom observations to reconstruct teachers’ implicit orientations toward resonance and their pedagogical practices. By doing so, the study contributes empirically to current European debates on pedagogical professionalism, relational teaching, and meaningful education under conditions of social acceleration.

Theoretical Origins of Resonance Pedagogy

Resonance pedagogy is theoretically rooted in the resonance theory developed by Hartmut Rosa (2016, 2019), which conceptualizes resonance as a counter-concept to late-modern experiences of acceleration, alienation, and social exhaustion. Resonance refers to a “successful relationship to the world” characterized by mutual openness, responsiveness, and transformation. It is not understood as harmony or permanent positivity, but as a fragile and dynamic process that includes moments of disruption.

Applied to education, this perspective reframes teaching and learning not as processes of knowledge transmission but as relational and experiential events. Teaching becomes resonant when teachers and students respond authentically to one another and when subject matter mediates meaningful world relations. European scholars such as Beljan, Endres, and Winkler conceptualize schools as “spaces of resonance” and emphasize the relational quality of educational processes.

Although Rosa’s theory is sociological in origin, its foundations are deeply embedded in European philosophical and educational traditions. Relational conceptions of education can be traced back to Plato’s notion of pedagogical eros as well as to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, who emphasize emotional attunement, responsiveness, and enthusiasm in educational relationships. Phenomenological perspectives, particularly those of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, further inform resonance pedagogy by highlighting embodied and affective dimensions of subject–world relations. Hermeneutic traditions and critical theories of alienation, especially Karl Marx’s concept of alienation, complement this framework by contrasting resonant with reified modes of relating to the world.

This proposal aims to deepen the theoretical understanding of subjectivity in education and explore how educational experiences shape its emergence. Subject, as commonly understood in the educational discourse, often focuses on the “self” and “I”, emphasizing how one might exist as the agent of one’s own life. Yet, less attention has been given to how subjectivity emerges and what it ought to be (Todd, 2023). In this regard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work could perhaps offers some important inspirations for discussion. For them, subjectivity is continually being produced, transformed, and assembled within capitalism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Subjectivity thus is not a unified Self but “a product of individuals, groups, and institutions” (Guattari, 2000, p. 1), with a polyphonic, multicentred, heterogeneous character (Guattari, 1995). Subjectivity thus includes non- and pre-personal dimensions, shaped by flows of desire that exceed individual consciousness. The task, then, is not to reclaim an authentic self, but to understand the dynamic processes through which subjectivity takes form. As Guattari writes:

Thus, on the one hand there is the infantilization of the production of subjectivity, with the intense binarization of messages, uniformization and unidimensionization of relations to the world and, on the other, expansion of other non-denotative functions of language: the composition of rhythms and the unprecedented production of relations to the world. (Guattari, 2009, p. 74)

As the literature on educationalization suggests, education functions as a vital process in the formation of modern subjects, where social issues once framed as economic, political, or ethical are rearticulated in the educational discursive framework (Depaepe, 1997; Fendler, 2018). The subject thus becomes a battleground between the homogenizing power of capitalism and heterogeneity, mediated through mechanisms of social subjection and machinic enslavement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983; Lazzarato, 2014). Countering these mechanisms, Deleuze and Guattari developed concepts that respond to and exceed dominant regimes of subjectivation. This proposal will also particularly focus on notions from Guattari’s work, such as metamodelization and the ethico-aesthetic paradigm, to articulate a more nuanced understanding of subjectivity’s capacity to invent new assemblages of meaning and modes of existence. Against this backdrop, this proposal asks: What does education uniquely possess that renders it reducible to the capitalist machine? What does it mean to be “educated”, instead of “educationalized”? What does education offer in the (re-)invention and (re-)singularization of subjectivity?

On the other hand, this proposal incorporates the theoretical perspective of curriculum as a crucial conceptual link between education and subjectivity. Curriculum theory, having undergone multiple transformation, most notably through the Reconceptualist movement in the U.S. context (Pinar, 1975, 2011, 2022), continues to evolve in its understanding of education. Curriculum theorizing entails “a form of practical-theoretical reason” (Pinar, 2004, p. 25) that rethinks experience and representation, treating curriculum as “texts, events, encounters, and experiences” that provoke pause, second thoughts, and the unlearning of memories that entangle us (Phelan, 2015, p. 5). In this sense, curriculum becomes a “complicated conversation,” an interdisciplinary ethical, political, and aesthetic undertaking that engages the entanglements of human agency, responsibility, society, and historical moments in relation to subjectivity. From this standpoint, curriculum theory is particularly suited to addressing the emergence of the “educated,” rather than the merely “educationalized,” subject. Integrating curriculum theory will thus be invaluable for illuminating the distinctive values that education holds for the shaping of subjectivity.

To summarize, this proposal will be guided by the following two research questions:

1. What is distinctive about education in the production of subjectivity today?

2. In the Hong Kong context, how does schooling creates conditions for the invention and singularization of students’ subjectivities?

My work examines love as a way of knowing, framed by epistemological considerations from a diversity and inclusion standpoint. It applies the findings in pedagogic contexts to support a revitalization of knowledge-making practices that address issues of epistemic injustice in classrooms and beyond.

The traditional western classroom operates on epistemological traditions that prioritize certain forms of knowledge over others, namely Descartes’s mind/body split (Paris & Winn, 2014) in a “banking” model of education that Freire critiques as "characteristic of the ideology of oppression” (Freire, 2017). Pedagogies that stem from these limited models of knowledge-making often alienate students who come from different epistemological backgrounds; as Junot Diaz wrote about the creative writing classroom in particular, “I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental experiences” (Chavez, 2021). This gestures to the need for not only radically inclusive practices that shift dynamics of privilege and marginalization but also distinct ways of knowing that honour other ways to be.

I use theoretical frameworks outlined by feminist pedagogues such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Ursula K. Le Guin to argue that love is crucial to dismantling colonial understandings of “legitimate knowledge” in favour of “knowledge in the making” intersecting with “selves in the making” (Ellsworth, 2005). I also engage with decolonial methodologies like storytelling, connecting, and sharing (Smith, 2012) to honour the many forms in which learning has existed across cultures for centuries. Seeing knowledge as embodied, relational process foregrounds praxis that caters to diverse lived experiences and identities. While pedagogues including Freire have written about the role of love in pedagogy, I focus especially on the epistemological implications of love, based on definitions of revolutionary love outlined by queer Black feminists, including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, bell hooks, and adrienne maree brown.

I came to this topic while working with Indigenous youth in Canada, and with the federal government as a Policy Analyst in the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, where questions of what counts as legitimate knowledge and data are highly relevant. Different communities had different definitions of how to learn, how to transmit that learning, and even what counts as learning or knowledge itself; these concerns are not limited to the Canadian context but essential to engage with everywhere. As part of my project, I developed anti-racist and decolonial writing workshops to further accessible ways of supporting students historically excluded from institutions of learning due to the delegitimization of their lived realities. Based on my teaching experience, I will share examples of exercises that provoke attention to emergence, holding emotions, and embracing love as ways of making sense in community, in opposition to a Cartesian mind/body split.

With the increasing prevalence of AI in education, developing different ways to learn and know has become extremely relevant not only to marginalized students but to everyone. I argue that love is a deeply critical skill and a means to counter current challenges to engage students in critical thinking, as LLM models can bring about a "knowledge collapse" (Peterson, 2025): a gradual narrowing of the information humans can access, along with a declining awareness of other viewpoints and other ways of knowing, the more that we treat that knowledge as singular or static. As such, though my work has clear outcomes in classroom spaces, these epistemological considerations can act as a guiding framework across a range of settings and disciplines as we redefine what knowledge means and how to share it in this crucial time.