This paper brings together Arendt's insights on evil and thinking along with her concerns about the role of emotions in political life. The central questions driving this exploration are two: How does Arendt understand 'thinking' in her theory of evil and what can educators learn from this? What are her concerns about the role of emotions in…

This paper asks: when political emotions are invoked in the classroom, can this be done without the process of democratic education degenerating into a form of emotional and/or political indoctrination? The source of inspiration for addressing this question is Hannah Arendt's political thought on emotion and education. The aim of the article is to…

This is a response to Ásgeir Tryggvason's argument that the deliberative critique of the agonistic approach to citizenship education is based on a misreading of the main concepts in agonistic theory--a misreading that has important implications for any attempt to bring closer agonism and deliberation in citizenship education. My aim in this…

Within the broad Freirean paradigm that dominates critical pedagogy, there is a tendency to assume that affects such as love, hope, and empathy as well as revolutionary agency are naturally occurring in all human beings and that conscientization will eventually lead to empowerment for change (Amsler 2011). However, it is not clear how the workings…

In this article we discuss how the design of a higher education language course can challenge the power of sentimentality in the classroom. In particular, the paper analyses the role of literature in intercultural language education through the lens of affect theory, while focusing on minimizing sentimentality in the classroom, especially when the…

This paper discusses teacher resistance to recognizing some perspectives of difficult histories. The paper focuses on the following question: How does affect contribute not only to the formation of teacher resistance, but also to its disruption in ways that enable the productive reclaiming of teachers' engagement with traumatic histories? To…

Using insights from the tradition of "via negativa" and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this paper proposes that unknowability can occupy an important place in teaching and learning, a place that embraces the "unknowable" in general, as well as the "unknowable Other," in particular. It is argued that turning toward both "via negativa" and Levinas…

Discusses the issues related to evaluation of distance education and virtual schooling. The evaluation design of a virtual high school project is presented, and goals, stakeholder analysis, evaluator role, data collection, and data analysis are described. The need for evaluation of distance education and the ethical responsibility of the…