ABSTRACT
Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) has a political dimension and is intertwined with questions of emotions and conflicts. When discussing sustainability issues in the classroom, heated emotions and conflicts between students can arise. But discussions about sustainability issues can also lack both engagement and emotional involvement from the students, even when the teacher brings up what s/he thinks is a burning sustainability issue. A crucial question is then how to approach emotions in ESE in a non-instrumental way and where the political dimension of emotions can be put to the fore. This chapter outlines two strategies to teach with and through political emotions in environmental and sustainability education. The first strategy is simplification, which simplifies the complexity and the conflictual aspect of sustainability issues. When a classroom discussion is characterised by an emotional indifference or a lack of engagement, simplification is a strategy to approach this indifference. The second strategy is circulation, which is a way to maintain the intensity of emotions, or to (re)orientate them toward other objects and issues. When emotions run high in a discussion, circulation is a strategy to approach these emotions as productive elements of a vibrant environmental and sustainability education.
