Explore the impact of emotion on education
How ‘Affect’ is affecting educational practice and research will bring together four academic papers examining how emotion, feeling and pedagogy intersect. Each presentation will delve into different aspects of how affect shapes – and is shaped by – educational contexts.
Topics will include horse-assisted affective learning, the emotional labour of school principals, the role of pedagogical risk-taking in early childhood education and practices for building empathic solidarity with asylum seekers.
Through these diverse perspectives, the event aims to deepen our understanding of how emotions are not only an intrinsic part of the educational process but also a key factor in shaping educational practices, relationships and environments. Participants can expect a rich, thought-provoking dialogue on the powerful, often overlooked role of affect in education.
Event details
Location: Deakin Downtown, Level 12, Tower 2 Collins Square, 727 Collins Street, Docklands and online via Zoom.
Date: 1pm to 5pm AEDT Monday 24 February 2025
Cost: This event is free to attend.
Keynote speaker
Entangled and affective leadership, entangled and affective learning with animal others
Professor Dorthe Staunæs (Aarhus University)
Stress, burnout, poor wellbeing and rising diagnoses underscore the urgent need for sustainable leadership. While many advocate for psychological safety and people-centred approaches, this keynote takes a radical turn, proposing a regenerative leadership model beyond anthropocentrism.
Drawing on Haraway (2021), it critiques leadership frameworks that prioritise humans and singular emotions while overlooking entangled, affective relationships with other beings. How can leadership confront the legacies of capitalism, colonisation and ecological destruction?
Regenerative leadership offers one possible solution, embracing diversity-sensitive approaches to counter the permacrisis – ongoing global crises such as wars, natural disasters, epidemics and mass extinction. This paradigm challenges the entrenched belief in human exceptionalism, advocating for behaviours that ‘give’ rather than ‘take,’ ensuring actions enrich rather than diminish the world.
Grounded in Indigenous knowledge, such as Sila’s interconnected worldview (Tuck 2009), regenerative leadership reimagines collaboration and sustainability. However, without practical, pedagogical experimentation, regenerative leadership risks becoming an empty concept.
This paper explores horse-assisted pedagogy as a tangible method for cultivating interconnectedness in leaders. By harnessing the ancient bond between humans and horses, leaders develop relational awareness through imitative mirroring, fostering sustainable leadership. Ultimately, this work calls for unlearning extractive practices and embracing regenerative ways of being, creating conditions for co-existence with the Earth and other beings.
Presentations
Invisible labour: School principals’ emotional labour in volatile times
Presented by Professor Jane Wilkinson (Monash University), this session examines the emotional labour of Australian school principals navigating socially volatile times. It highlights how increasing system accountabilities complicate this role. Drawing on preliminary findings from a nationwide survey, it explores critical incidents that reveal the hidden values, rules and behaviours underlying principals’ emotional labour. The presentation argues for the value of a practice-based approach, such as the theory of practice architectures, in grounding abstract notions of affect, biology and the preconscious within the sociomateriality of practices and organisational arrangements.
Educators’ risk-taking in high-quality early childhood education
Dr Mandy Cooke from Deakin University explores the emotions associated with pedagogical risk-taking in early childhood education. Drawing on data from an Australian multisite case study, Dr Cooke highlights how negative affect and emotional labour shape educators' risk-taking. She presents a model for addressing relational tensions through collective feeling-thinking praxis, offering strategies to promote risk-taking while embedding empathy and humanity in educational practice.
Practices of building empathic solidarity with young people seeking asylum and the role of the emotional
Dr Sally Morgan from Monash University shares insights from critical participatory action research with asylum-seeking young people, focusing on the emotional aspects of building empathic solidarity in the Hope Co-operative, a community organisation run by and for people seeking asylum. This presentation highlights emotions as a vital aspect of practices that cultivate empathic solidarity – understood as cross-cultural and community-based solidarity between citizens and forced migrants. It explores the emotional dimensions within ecologies of practices that foster socially just educational inclusion for young people seeking asylum. By analysing emotion as a practice-changing element, the presentation underscores its power in shaping educational praxis and raises important questions about advancing equity and social justice through education and research.
Meet the speakers
Professor Dorthe Staunæs is a professor at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, with 25 years of experience researching diversity, leadership and policy in education. Her work focuses particularly on affect and intersectional subject formations. She is concluding two major projects: Diversity Work as Mood Work and Affective Investments in Diversity Work in STEM. New research explores diversity pedagogy and leadership in art academies, STEM fields and professional education programs, examining both sides of colonial relationships. Her ongoing work also explores regenerative leadership and the potential of more-than-human relations, such as those between horses and humans, in shaping learning and leadership in social and epistemic diversity. Methodologically, she draws on feminist new materialist, black feminist and more-than-human approaches.
Professor Jane Wilkinson is a professor of educational leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her research focuses on educational leadership for social justice, practice theory, refugee education and women in leadership. She has expertise in practice architectures theory, alongside critical feminist and Bourdieuian frameworks. Professor Wilkinson currently leads an Australian Research Council grant examining the emotional labour of public school principals in socially volatile times.
Dr Mandy Cooke is a senior lecturer in early childhood education at Deakin University with over 20 years’ of experience as an early childhood and primary teacher. Her academic work is centred on transforming educational practices for the benefit of individuals, communities and a socially just, sustainable world. She works with preservice teachers to develop them as critically reflective practitioners and conducts research in initial teacher education and pedagogical practices. Her main research focus is on risk-taking in education, both for children and educators.
Dr Sally Morgan is a lecturer in secondary education at Monash University. With over 20 years of experience as a secondary teacher, curriculum leader and activist educator, Dr Morgan's research and teaching focus on relational pedagogies, cross-cultural competence and educational equity. Her interests centre on practices that enhance educational access for people experiencing disadvantage and exclusion, and on critical understandings of the conditions that enable and constrain educational equity. She is committed to participatory action research, ethics-in-practice, student agency and restorative practice.
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