The value of sustaining a positive classroom climate for student’s cognitive, social, and emotional development is well documented in educational research. Generally referring to the prevailing mood, atmosphere, ambience, or tone of the classroom, the influence of different classroom climates on students’ academic achievements has been confirmed. At the same time, the notion of ‘classroom climate’ seems to oscillate between a language of either mystery or metrics, rendering it sometimes too vague and at other times too technical for capturing the lived and embodied meaning of classroom life. In World-centred Education, Biesta (2021) touches upon this general deficit in educational research, inviting us to explore possible (re)turns to the existential dimensions of contemporary education. As a response to Beista’s invitation, the overall aim of this paper is to offer a phenomenological-sensory analysis of the notion of classroom climate to educational research and practice by unfolding the notion in the double gesture of mapping and reconstructing. By making some of the meanings of classroom climate distinct and by drawing on Heidegger’s phenomenology of Stimmung and on Rita Felski’s work on mood in literary studies, the more specific purpose of the paper is to offer an existential language about classroom climate that takes the care for an education that is world-centred (Biesta) seriously. To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. In the first part, I am looking particularly at how and when the concept of classroom climate emerged in research, some of its developments, and how it is currently being discussed in educational research. In the second part, I am reconstructing the concept of classroom climate as the educational process of ‘being initiated into a certain sensibility’ or ‘attunement’ to the world (Felski 2015, p, 22). As an educational process of initiation, the climate or mood of the classroom always exceeds our individual experiences or personal feelings, attuning teachers and students to each other, the subject matter, and to different aspects of educational life. In this sense, I argue, different ‘educational moods’ always accompany our pedagogical interactions, affecting how teachers and students find themselves in relation to each other and the world: the parts of the subject matter they are drawn to or repelled by, the questions they ask or leave behind, the pedagogical and social relations they value or find unsignificant. By way of conclusion, I sum up my argument, returning to the main contributions of the paper.

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