Conference Agenda

Background and problem definition.

The landscape of knowledge production in the educational sciences is rapidly shifting: actors, validation regimes, and epistemic priorities are re‑ordered by transnational metrics, data platforms, and new inspection ecologies (Beer, 2016; Ozga, 2015; Grek & Ozga, 2010; Grek, 2024). Governments increasingly outsource problem‑definition and evaluation to international organisations and commercial data infrastructures, with e.g. the OECD/PISA architecture becoming a central comparative and agenda‑setting device (Sellar & Lingard, 2014; Grek, 2024). This reconfiguration redistributes epistemic authority away from situated academic/professional judgement toward portable indicators and automated analytics (Grek & Ozga, 2010; Ozga, 2015; Janssen & Kuk, 2016). Simultaneously, the rise of big data, rankings, and algorithmic governance entrenches routinised, standardised, and quantifiable ways of knowing (Beer, 2016; Janssen & Kuk, 2016). Digital disruptions, such as generative AI, further intensify questions of sincerity, authenticity and public reliability (Janssen & Kuk, 2016; Knox et al., 2019)

To address the hybrid and increasingly performative dynamics of today’s knowledge ecosystem, this paper adopts Ágnes Heller’s philosophy of the everyday as its conceptual core; as Dorahy (2020) argues, Heller remains a remarkable representative of the culture of humanity, offering a philosophical sensibility that is increasingly rare, and thus urgently needed in contemporary datafied research environment. Although Heller did not write explicitly about datafication, algorithmic governance, consultancy‑based expertise or AI, her framework offers conceptual resources for analysing how epistemic practices are shaped, stabilised and revised. In particular, her account links epistemic life to situated practices of judgement, remembrance, and publicity. This orientation differs from approaches that foreground procedural rationality or systemic integration, by drawing attention instead to the moral and practical texture of everyday action, where repetition may either consolidate into routine or sustain possibilities for renewal. The concepts of routine and repetition, remembrance and publicity are elaborated in the section below.

Conceptual/theoretical framework

While resonant with Arendt’s notion of the public realm (1958), Habermas’s theorisation of the public sphere/publicity (1989) and Dewey’s pragmatist conception of inquiry (1938), Heller’s emphasis on everyday praxis, repetition and remembrance introduces a distinctly micro‑ethical perspective on contemporary regimes of knowledge governance (Tormey, 2001; Tormey, 2009).

Routine and repetition in the everyday
The everyday, for Heller, is, the privileged locus of objectification, where meaning is continuously constituted through situated interpretation, repetition, and practical judgement (Heller, 1984). The hinge of her analysis is the contrast between routine (a habituated, largely unconscious mode of repetition that forecloses reflection) and forms of repetition that keep judgement and responsibility open; this contrast discloses how knowledge practices can harden into routinisation and reification, diminishing practical reason, while ethical renewal depends on open-ended everyday exercises of judgement (Heller, 1984; Heller, 2015). Read thus, the everyday is neither merely a sphere of alienation nor solely of renewal, but the ambivalent scene of both. Practices such as civil courage (the capacity to say “no”) and humanistic formation (the cultivation of character through reciprocity) operate as micro-practices in which ethics and politics are enacted, training dispositions that render the routine/repetition distinction pedagogically operative rather than merely conceptual (Heller, 1984; Travaglini, 2019).

Remembrance
Remembrance, understood by Heller as the set of practices through which tradition and historical consciousness sustain shared meanings across time, is what renders publicity meaningful; when such practices are neglected, public claims lose their truthfulness and accountability (Heller, 2001). Read from the standpoint of the everyday, the displacement of remembrance by impersonal, externally governed arrangements fosters routinisation and reification, narrowing the space of practical judgement and weakening evaluative and moral discernment.

This paper addresses educators' roles in shaping how students learn to orient their lives within the scope between personal feelings of involvement and societal and universal values. Educators, such as teachers and social educators, are not psychologists or, for that matter, parents; therefore, we must discuss how they can address students' feelings of involvement in an educational way. With an educational way, I mean, following Gert Biesta, to “understand education from the inside out”, which means that education is to be understood in its own right and not as a discipline that theoretically and practically primarily draws on other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and philosophy (Biesta, 2024, p.14).

I draw on the Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller's work, A Theory of Feelings (Heller, 2009) with a specific focus on her definition of feelings as ‘being involved in something’ (Heller, 2009, p. 11) and her term ‘value-orientational categories’(Heller, 2009, p.134), which according to Heller, help people evaluate their feelings in line with societal norms. To keep in mind is Aristotle’s famous words that true education is to “feel joy and grief at the right things: true education is precisely this.” (Aristotle, 2004, p.35). Aristotle was a source of inspiration for Agnes Heller in understanding how human feelings and emotions conform to societal norms in everyday life (Heller, 2009; 2016). Heller does not explicitly address educational issues; however, throughout the book, she addresses educationally relevant issues, such as how humans learn to feel and how involvement in various ways and emotions is integral to human character formation.

The paper aims to develop an educational understanding of involvement to describe educational situations in which something in an educational context matters to the student in a way we may understand as emotional. However, to avoid a non-critical approach to Heller’s understanding of feelings as involvement, I will introduce a distinction between feeling involved in something and not feeling/avoiding feeling involved in something, where "something" here refers to an educational context. I will go back to this distinction later. This distinction will, as will become apparent later, be essential for developing Heller’s ideas within the context of modern theories of Bildung, as represented by Wolfgang Klafki and Dietrich Benner.

Heller distinguishes, in her categorisation of feelings, between feelings and emotions in a rather subtle way. Feelings can be basic and sometimes quite primitive, such as, for example, drive feelings and affects (Heller 20009 p.63); however, emotions are feelings that are, according to Heller, always cognitive and situational.” (Heller 2009 p.87) “Only cognitive and situational feelings can be “deep” that is those spiritual feelings in which the “natural” and the “inborn” have no part (…) A feeling is deep when it sets our whole personality into motion: we feel deeply when we become involved in something with our whole personality, either positively or negatively.” (Heller 2009, p.92). To understand how human beings evaluate their feelings, Heller introduces the term ‘value orientational categories’ where she distinguishes between the primary value orientation category Good or bad and the secondary orientations category pairs such as Good-Evil, beautiful-ugly, useful-harmful, correct-incorrect, and true-false (Heller, 2009, p.128).

Here again, we must distinguish between the primitive, natural feelings and feelings that can be characterised as emotional because they are cognitive and situational. Furthermore, Heller distinguishes between relating to the world in a particularistic and an individual way. The person who relates ‘particularistically’ to the world identifies herself “with the prescriptions and norms of his environment or develops his own 'we-consciousness.” (Heller, 2009, p.144). The person relating individually to the world is the one who “has a distance to himself and the world.

What have generosity and the gift to do with schooling and the teaching profession? This paper argues that the question is significant for educational theory and philosophy in at least two respects. First, in an educational climate where public discourse increasingly holds teachers responsible for society’s unresolved challenges, the profession is often portrayed as one of ‘constant giving’ that never quite fulfils the task entrusted to it. Second, both educational theory and practice frequently invoke the notion that a teacher must possess ‘a gift for teaching’ as a natural aptitude or talent. Yet the phrase ‘having a gift’ can also be taken literally, as referring to something given: a voluntary transfer that asks nothing in return. From this perspective, teaching concerns the transmission of culture, knowledge, and value across generations, situating pedagogy within the generosity of givenness itself (see e.g. Biesta, 2021; Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2025; Zembulas, 2024; Alcalá, 2024).

If such intergenerational transmission is indeed a gift, however, it cannot be conditional upon return. Contemporary schooling nevertheless frames teaching and learning in increasingly conditional terms. Children are required to render themselves ‘teachable’ in prescribed ways – silent, attentive, orderly, resilient – in order to be deemed worthy of instruction. Teachers, likewise, must prove themselves ‘instruction‑ready’ by securing order, directing attention, and streamlining learning outcomes; only then are they recognised as professionals who possess ‘the gift of teaching.’ Perhaps we demand too much in return from both students and teachers; or perhaps our pedagogical optics of giving are simply misaligned.

Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to examine the distinction between giving of oneself in teaching and giving oneself (over) in teaching. More specifically, I argue for the pedagogical value of temporary failures of meaning – moments in which the world phenomenologically shows itself otherwise and comes to presence in qualitatively new ways in teaching (Biesta, 2021). To make this case, the paper unfolds as a philosophical argument in three movements, adopting a deliberately ‘generous reading’ (Thayer‐Bacon, 2003) as a methodological stance: a way of engaging theoretical traditions that refrains from policing their borders but invites surplus meanings by resisting a purely ‘suspicious hermeneutics’.

In the first part, I reconstruct three strands in educational thought that concern the notions of gift and giving. (a) The aptitude strand treats ‘a gift for teaching’ as a natural talent and professional disposition. While this acknowledges the craft and artistry of pedagogy, it risks naturalising teaching (some ‘have it,’ others do not), reducing it to technical proficiency. (b) The transmissive strand understands education as generational task – handing on a shared world. Here the teacher’s role is safeguarding and world‑introducing, emphasising responsibility for inheritance, tradition, and the durability of the world. (c) The ethical strand configures the gift as an asymmetrical relation that exceeds exchange, evoking hospitality and a surplus not captured by calculation. This strand enables us to think of teaching as more than transaction and transmission, though it sometimes remains vague about practice. I identify points of intersection across these strands and outline their implications for the kind of ‘gift giving’ we ask teachers and students to preform.