The classroom as a ‘holding environment’: Affect and dissonance in education for sustainability

The importance of cultivating classroom environments where students feel physically and emotionally safe and can express themselves and their ideas freely is well documented in educational research. However, in times of democratic and ecological turmoil, creating classroom environments that are sufficiently open and supportive when addressing value conflicts or difficult ethical and existential issues presents significant challenges. This article proposes an educational language that addresses the affective, dissonant, and embodied dimensions of classroom life. To this end, the article unfolds as a philosophical argument in three parts. First, Bonnie Honig’s political notion of “holding environments” is read as a pedagogical notion, highlighting how such classroom environments can bring students with different values and affective attachments together around “public things” that are entangled in sustainability issues. Second, the pedagogical notion of holding environments is put to the test by a scene from the empirical classroom. Drawing on Rita Felski and Martin Heidegger, the concept of “attunement through atmosphere” (German Stimmung ) is thirdly introduced as a way of analyzing the affective and sensory micro landscape of the “good enough” open and supportive classroom environment. By way of conclusion, it is argued that education for sustainability is as much about knowledge acquisition and developing skills, as about world-disclosure and finding one’s place in the planetary situation we are in.