Political education and emotions

In this lecture, we will explore the question of why we find it so difficult to deal with emotions in political education, what significance they have for the process of political education, and what an emotion-sensitive political education could look like.

The author of the lecture is Prof. Dr. Anja Besand. The lecture is 48 minutes long.

Further reading:

Arnold, Rolf (2005): The emotional construction of reality. Contributions to adult education based on emotion pedagogy. Baltmannsweiler

Besand, Anja / Overwien, Bernd / Zorn, Peter (ed.) (2019): Political education with feeling. Bonn

Besand, Anja (2016): On the relationship between emotionality and professionalism in civic education. In: Heinrich Böll Foundation (ed.): Ideologies of inequality. Berlin, pp. 77-83 read more

Brauer, Juliane / Lücke, Martin (eds.) (2013): Emotions, history and historical learning. Historical-didactic and historical-cultural perspectives. Göttingen. read entry in the database of the transfer office

Breit, Gotthard (2016): With passion and a sense of proportion at the same time. On the tension between rationality and emotionality in political education. Schwalbach/Ts

Holzapfel, Günther (2018): Feelings as an instance of knowledge. In: Magazine Junge.Kirche. Focus on politics and emotion. H. 3, PP. 46-47

Oeftering, Tonio / Uhl, Herbert (2017): Emotions and political learning. In: Dirk Lange, & V. Reinhardt (eds.): Conceptions, strategies and content areas of civic education. Basic knowledge of political education: Handbook for social science teaching. Volume 1, Baltmannsweiler, pp. 560-575

Petri, Annette (2018): Emotion-sensitive political education. Consequences of emotion research for the theory and practice of civic education. Frankfurt/M.

Schröder, Achim (2017): Emotionalization of politics and authoritarianism. Challenges for contemporary political education. You can find the full text here.

Weber-Stein, Florian (2017): The affective dimension of the hermeneutic circle: emotional conditioning factors of political value judgment formation. In: journal for the didactics of the social sciences, vol. 7, p. 1, pp. 54-73

Self-assessment tasks

Question 1: Why does political education in Germany have so many problems engaging with emotions or sensitive approaches?

Question 2: Using emotions as a starting point for political education processes is relatively easy to imagine - but can the development of certain emotions also be the goal of educational processes? Which emotions could possibly be considered here and how can they be encouraged? Or what dangers arise in this context?

Question 3: The "Beutelsbacher Konsens" warns us in political education not to overwhelm learners in the development of their own judgments. How does this warning relate to the demand to take emotions seriously in educational processes and what would a defense strategy against the accusation of overwhelming look like?

Question 4: If you look at the project examples on the EINFACH GUT GEMACHT platform - which of the projects presented there do you think deals with emotions in a successful way? Give reasons for your choice!

Question 5: In your opinion, what would emotion-sensitive political education look like? Outline a project idea.