Doubt, excitement, pleasure

This chapter discusses how processes of teaching and learning in art education could productively draw on feminist thinking to make sense of affective experiences such as doubt, excitement, and pleasure. Art and education are two fields where affect plays a primary role: while art is firmly connected to perception, the senses, and aesthetic experience, and therefore involves both body and mind, feminist practices of teaching and learning aim at both the transformation of the self as well as the conditions in which one learns. Within the last two decades in the field of art and education, art educators, teachers, theorists, and artists have been intensively working with language and discourse as a central mode of the production, reflection, and distribution of knowledge. ¹ At the same time, the sphere of feelings, emotions, the body, and affects has not been taken into account so much. Learning processes always also involve affects. As this topic is still very young, and only a few previous studies have explicitly drawn on affects within processes of teaching and learning in art education, ² I would like to contribute to this emergent field of discourse by drawing on the nuanced and multifold elaborations of feminist thinkers and teachers who have scrutinized the role of affects, feelings, and emotions within learning processes. I am interested in exploring the multifold and critical legacies of feminist thinking about teaching and learning that relate to affect.