On the mattering of wonder: Experience, becoming, and education

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of articulating the nature and mattering of wonder within educational thought. While recognized as significant, wonder remains conceptually elusive and is commonly reduced to an emotion or pedagogical tool. Drawing on the process-relational philosophies of William James and Alfred North Whitehead, this paper advances an account of wonder as an intensified mode of participation in the ongoing becoming of experience. Informed by empirical accounts of preservice teachers’ engagements with wonder, experience is understood as an ongoing process in which past actualities are integrated with emerging possibilities in the formation of each new occasion. Within this framework, wonder is conceptualized as an intensification of experience in which ordinarily backgrounded relational dynamics become experientially salient, initially in subtle or only partially formed ways. Wonder is thus recognizable as a threefold movement characterized by (1) disruption of habitual patterns, (2) heightened sensitivity to unrealized possibilities as they begin to lure feeling and attention, and (3) the emergence of new relations and intensities. This account expands the question of what wonder is to how it functions within experience, while also offering an explanation for its resistance to stable definition. In doing so, it contributes to education philosophy by reframing wonder as an intensified mode of relational experience through which new possibilities for thought, relation, and learning become experientially available.