Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

What does the learning moment feel like? This course explores the sensations of learning and how our interactions with everyday objects influence that process. We investigate historical and current debates of what it means to feel, know, and learn in education, with particular attention to the politics and ethics of feeling. In doing so, we interrogate narratives that reproduce hierarchies of ways of knowing in educational spaces as well as binary oppositions such as thinking-feeling, mind-body, subject-object, and human-nature. Speculative fiction, film, art, contemporary philosophies and theories in education and beyond, and other relevant materials—including the objects around us—inform our study. The course is organized into four sections. The first section examines the intellectual foundations that inform what it means to know and to learn. The second section turns to how feelings—both feelings-as-sensations and feelings-as-emotions—are approached in education. The third section considers everyday things as active participants in the learning process, complicating hierarchies of knowing and being often taken for granted in educational spaces. The fourth section builds on these previous sections to explore approaches that reinterpret static conceptualizations of the body and subjectivity in education, illustrating strategies for more creative and ethical ways of engaging with the world.

Student Outcomes

Upon successful course completion, students will be able to . . . 1. critically understand and interrogate ontological, epistemological, and political issues surrounding schooling, pedagogy, and education; 2. identify relevant debates in relation to knowledge, learning, and feeling in education, articulating their positions critically and reflectively; 3. demonstrate an ability to engage these issues with curiosity, creativity, integrity, and growth in broader discussions beyond the classroom; and from the University Learning Goals, 4. “appreciate varied disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods for acquiring knowledge and demonstrate the ability to synthesize knowledge from multiple disciplines.”

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