In this article, I leverage the sociological insights of Randall Collins to examine contemporary accounts of "fun teaching" in teacher education: the pervasive mood of "fun," "energy," and "enthusiasm" in North American education faculties and popular teacher professional development literature. Focusing on…

The increased governmental focus on happiness since the late 1990s, and particularly since the economic crash of 2008, has been informed predominantly by a conceptualisation of happiness promoted by the field of positive psychology, and adopted and developed in fields such as behavioural economics and more recently in fields such as…

The primary purpose of this paper is to outline the conceptual means by which it is possible to be optimistic about education. To provide this outline I turn to Ian Hunter and David Blacker, after a brief introduction to Nietzsche's conceptions of optimism and pessimism, to show why certain forms of optimism in education are either intellectually…

In this commentary, I delineate several questions raised by the Hammond and Drummond (2019) paper: (a) to why there seems to be an association between state positive emotion and prosocial behavior in young children, and if and how early positively tinged prosocial behavior provides a pathway to (b) later prosocial behavior more generally…

This paper considers the sociology of education (SOE) as a modern human science. It suggests that the SOE is mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, Enlightment rationalities, and explores the messy relationships of the sociology with education that result from this. It is argues that the sociology of education has consistently failed to…

In this article I draw on Lauren Berlant's notion of "cruel optimism" to identify and untangle how the prevailing sense of "optimism" in education works against our common hope or collective striving for what is educational in education. In particular, I discuss how the "cruel optimism" that invites individuals to…

The highly imagined and contested space of higher education is invested with an affectively loaded "knowledge economy optimism". Drawing on recent work in affect and critical geography, this paper considers the e/affects of the promises of the knowledge economy on its knowledge workers. We extend previous analyses of the discursive…

There has been much interest in happiness over the last decade fueled by developments in neuroscience and the measurement of happiness. Positive psychology has emerged as a recognised discipline within academia to provide a home for the findings of the new scientific study of happiness. In 2011, positive psychology was the most popular course at…

Evidence has emerged which suggests that as a supervisor, the importance of knowing oneself, and knowing those that he or she is supervising, is vital to the success of the group. We argue that when conflicting values, attitudes, and beliefs are present amongst the members of the group over an issue (inclusion), or over the behaviours of a member…

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific "subject" environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking…

In this article, the authors examine strategies for supporting college students with learning disabilities (LD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from the conceptual frameworks of positive psychology and self-efficacy theory. Higher education professionals can use principles taken from the relatively new field of positive…

This article reviews research on homeschool learner outcomes and evaluates opposition to homeschooling. It synthesizes research on learner outcomes related to homeschooling in areas of students' academic achievement and children's social, emotional, and psychological development and the success of adults who were home educated and finds generally…