ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses social theories of feeling and biological science of feeling together to develop an understanding of feelings as simultaneously social and biological and demonstrates the importance of feelings in the classroom. Education scholarship has in past decade or so returned to feeling and the social nature of feelings as they circulate in classrooms and between students and teachers. The chapter illustrates how sociological work is attempting to encounter and understand feeling in school encounters by revisiting data generated through a research project undertaken by Deborah in a 'special school' for boys diagnosed as having 'Social Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties'. The discussion of the Volatile organic compounds profiles of stress in Turner and colleagues' work and a range of feelings in Williams and colleagues' research leads us away from the disease of stress in classrooms to an encounter with the possibilities of understanding happiness, pleasure and perhaps even jouissance in classroom encounters.
