This special issue examines education and resistance in the context of the climate emergency, foregrounding the interconnected roles of affect, aesthetics, and conflict. Emerging from the 6th symposium of the Studies in Conflict, Culture, and the Political in Education (SCAPE) research network, convened in 2023 at Maynooth University (Ireland), the collection comprises seven articles and one provocation essay, each seeking to respond to the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change. The contributions situate education within the material, political, and existential conditions produced by climatic and ecological disruption, while critically engaging the contested interpretations through which this crisis and its emergency are understood in a polarized world. Rather than treating the climate emergency as a singular or consensual object of concern, the issue foregrounds dissensus, relationality, and aesthetics as constitutive dimensions of educational thought and practice. Conflict is thus approached not as a problem to be resolved but as a potential generative force within education, requiring attention to sensory-affective, embodied-aesthetic, and more-than-human relations. A unifying thread across the contributions is a reworking of resistance as a pedagogical practice grounded in attentiveness and gentleness, oriented against hegemonic powers and sensitive to the indeterminacy and relationality that characterizes subjectivity. Collectively, the intellectual engagements of this issue offer plural perspectives on how education might cultivate new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and sharing worlds under conditions of ecological precarity, opening pedagogical space for uncertainty, dissensus, and renewed judgment.

The value of sustaining an open and positive classroom climate for student's academic and socio-emotional development is well documented in educational research. Referring to the prevailing mood or atmosphere of the classroom, the concept is meant to capture the day-to-day experiences of teachers and students on a collective rather than individual level. At the same time, the notion of 'classroom climate' seems to belong to a language of educational impreciseness, rendering it sometimes too vague and at other times too technical for capturing the lived and embodied meaning of classroom life. Inspired by Gert Biesta's call for a world-centred education, the paper offers a sensory-phenomenological analysis of the concept of classroom climate by unfolding the concept in the double gesture of mapping and reconstructing. By differentiating some of the meanings of classroom climate in previous research, and by drawing on Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of Stimmung and on Rita Felski's work on mood and attunement, the paper explores what a more precise and meaningful way of speaking about classroom climate and what matters educationally in sustaining a positive classroom climate may look like. To this end, the notion of 'educational moods' offers semantic resources not yet considered within educational research.

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.

Finns det något i en skolas kultur som förklarar varför elever trivs och presterar väl, trots att de yttre omständigheterna inte alltid är de bästa?

Antologin Synliggjord skolkultur diskuterar skolkulturens betydelse för elevers trivsel och prestationer i socialt och ekonomiskt utsatta områden. Med skolkultur avses här vardagliga interna faktorer som, vid sidan av skolans yttre ramar och styrdokument, bidrar till en tryggare skolvardag för alla elever oavsett bakgrund. I en tid då kunskapsmätningar tar stor plats i det offentliga samtalet kan vardagslivet i skolan lätt hamna i skymundan. Samtidigt är det just sådana interna delar av en skolas kultur som ofta lyfts fram som betydelsefulla av de som befinner sig där. 

Författarna synliggör olika delar av det som här kallas skolkultur utifrån skilda studier och med hjälp av en rad olika exempel. Förhoppningen är att antologin ska bidra med kunskap om skolors inre liv och på så sätt inspirera till ett mer nyanserat samtal, både inom och utanför akademin, om den svenska skolans framtid och utveckling. 

Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, this response article focusses on the tension between hope in the future and lost hope in the present inherent in the modern idea of progress. The backdrop of the Suite 'Education after Progress' is some of the interrelated challenges that we are facing today, such as climate change, new pandemics, mass migration, and the rise of populism. Drawing on different philosophical concepts and strands, the five articles in the Suite explore what it would mean to learn and educate beyond the imagery of progress. Thinking beyond, however, is never an easy task and the question becomes how to orient oneself in this new philosophical landscape without losing track of what is educationally important and meaningful. After responding to each article, focussing on five possible connections between them (change, orientation, time, situatedness, and immanence), the response article concludes with the more general question of what place, if any, concepts as the past, conservation, and preservation have in an education 'after' progress.

The paper offers a pedagogical response to the complexity of sustainability challenges that takes the existential and emotional dimensions of climate change seriously. To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. The first part makes a distinction between 'public pedagogy' as an area of educational scholarship and 'pedagogical publics' as a theoretical lens for identifying certain qualities within educational environments, exploring what potential this distinction has for rethinking public pedagogy for sustainable development. Turning to Bonnie Honig (2015) and her call for creating 'holding environments' in the public sphere as a response to the democratic need of our time, the second part translates her political notion into an educational notion asking what fostering pedagogical publics as holding environments might involve. In relation to sustainability challenges, it is suggested that an environment that 'holds' people together as a pedagogical public has three main qualities: a) it makes room for new rituals for sustainable living to be developed in order to offer a sense of permanence; b) it invites narratives that can frame sustainability challenges in more positive registers; and c) it reinstates an intergenerational difference that serves to give back hopes and dreams to adults and children in troubling times.