No abstract

This volume takes two different, albeit intertwined approaches. The first concerns a reformulation of aesthetics in education-one which highlights the sensory dimensions of educational experience. The second concerns a turn to the body and the senses as that which is deeply involved in practices of teaching and learning. Keywords Senses • Body • Embodyment • Aestethics • LivingThis Special Issue was conceived long before the word COVID became part of our daily lexicon. We thought even then (way back in 2018!) that the sensory aspects of education were under theorized, if not downright forgotten, in the increasingly performative cultures that mark educational institutions at all levels as well as in contemporary theoretical framings of education. The pandemic's presence in our lives has occasioned a series of difficult adjustments around the globe, both personally and educationally, that none of us could have foreseen and which has only served to increase our sensitivity to the issues we identified earlier. For instance, because the virus is transferred through social contact, we have been compelled to minimize social encounters, largely avoiding physical meetings, shaking hands, hugging one another, and travelling to meet family, colleagues and friends. Educational institutions have been heavily affected by the lack of physical social contact as students of all ages have been sent into various forms of educational isolation, excluding them from the regular bodily interactions and material conditions that comprise everyday life in schools, universities and other educational settings. Teaching has moved onto digital

For many years the EERJ Roundtable has been a standing event within the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). In a discursive style it addresses issues related to contemporary relationships between educational research and educational policy in Europe. The changing educational landscape, together with shifting practices and discourses of educational research, prompted researchers to discuss the need for increased self-governance. It was taken up as the topic for the 2013 EERJ Roundtable and couched as a question: What is the possibility of a 'moot' for educational research in Europe? This article reports on the 2013 Roundtable. Its three short presentations and subsequent audience discussion have been summarised and reflected upon to make a case for a moot: a self-governing space for educational research. It reveals ECER, and particularly the EERJ Roundtable, as a scholarly and a political arena where the interplay between research, policy and larger patterns of social change can be reviewed, interrogated and appropriated critically into the disciplinary logics of educational research.

In this article we explore a notion of relationship which exists between humans. This notion of relationship takes as a point of departure that differences in human relations and interaction have to be safeguarded. Starting with the Irigarayan notion of 'two' as a gendered difference, opposed to an understanding of humans as one and same (gender), we elaborate an understanding of otherness which opens a space where both self and other are welcomed. This relational space cannot be appropriated by either one for it to exist. We continue by drawing from Harry G. Frankfurt's discussion of care in order to understand human (inter)actions in this space. Through an elaboration of how love as a special form of care represents a motivational drive, a way in which a person's will is formed, we try to show how this attentiveness towards the other is possible. Our point of departure is two statements by female head teachers that prompted these theoretical inquiries into other possibilities for interpreting human (inter)action in leadership in education.

The focus on children’s voices and experiences has been a substantial part of childhood studies. Research with children is closely linked to the idea of children as agents rather than seeing them as passive objects. In this article the authors examine how video ethnography, and the video camera in particular, in an Early Childhood Education and Care (ecec) facility is an actor that actively co-produces agency. The authors explore how agency is distributed in assemblages consisting of children, the researcher and the video camera. The authors argue that approaching agency as manifold and as distributed is helpful in a critical discussion of children and agency and point to the need to study agency as entangled with human and non-human actors in relational activities. Far from being a tool to represent the real world as it is, or merely a tool for “collecting” data, the video camera and the children are mutually constructed.