Making sense of the complex entanglement between emotion and pedagogy: contributions of the affective turn
The purpose of this paper is to highlight three recent contributions of the affective turn: moving beyond the emotion/reason dichotomy; highlighting the politics of emotion and affect; and, strengthening the intersections of the psychic and the social. While these contributions are not necessarily paradigmatic of scholarship in the affective turn, they do highlight some important threads of thinking about affect theory in several fields of study, and thus they can be insightful in the context of science education as well. This discussion is motivated by the notion that science teaching and learning can benefit theoretically from these latest developments of affect theory. Although the question of why science teaching and learning has not paid so much attention to emotion and affect in the past is no less important, this paper will move past this in an effort to focus on the openings that are created for pedagogy in general.