Are we witnessing in Europe a growing sense of meaninglessness and alienation in education? According to Hartmut Rosa (2019), there are two modes of relation and engagement with the world: the world as resource (something to be utilized and exploited individually) and the world as resonance (a shared place of meaning and connection). A third mode of engagement can be added to Rosa's analysis: the world as relationality through and through. As we engage in educational encounters, Sharon Todd (2023) reminds us, teachers and students are not only in and with the world, but they are first and foremost of the world. Hence, there seem to be different, and differently sensed and embodied, modalities of educational encounters in need of philosophical and theoretical exploration.

However, in a time of democratic and environmental crises, which affect our everyday lives and practices, educational research tends to lean towards the former (i.e. the world as a resource) while overlooking other forms of engagement. Within contemporary education policy and research, students are seen as a valuable 'human resource' to create a better and more sustainable future, teaching becomes the 'production' of pre-defined and measurable learning outcomes, and pedagogical relationships are reduced to something to be controlled and 'managed more effectively' by the teacher (Biesta, 2022). Schooling, in turn, is largely about teachers making their classrooms 'run smoothly' and about keeping students focused, engaged and 'on track' in their individual learning processes, optimizing children and young people's potential. At the same time, there is a sense of exhaustion and alienation in many empirical classrooms driven by a language of economy, efficiency, and output (Rosa & Enders, 2016). We are witnessing, moreover, a democratic and ecological crisis where the public nature of care and concern for a common world (natural and social) is decreasing and where the point of democratic deliberation and collective will formation seems increasingly unclear, not least among young people (Honig, 2017; Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2022).

Against this background, the purpose of the symposium is to explore alternative educational vocabularies about what is at stake and matters in educational encounters, which resonates with Rosa's (2019) call for modes of engagement in the world that emphasize contact and connectedness over competition and separation, meaning and care over efficiency and production, publicness and concern over individualism and personal output. To this end, the symposium brings together educational theorists from Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, and Canada. Drawing on different philosophical and theoretical strands and with experiences from different national and educational settings, the four symposium contributions highlight some of the counter-discourses on offer to the image of ‘homo economicus’ (Cavarero, 2016) and take them as inspiration to reconceptualize how educational relations are embodied, experienced, and lived in democratic troubling times. If alienation and indifference turn schools and classrooms into places of meaningless and ‘numb’ encounters that give young people the feeling that their actions make little or no difference in the world (Rosa & Endres, 2016), alternative imaginaries are needed. Modes of resonance and relationality, the symposium suggests, open pedagogical spaces where teachers and students can be touched and affected by the world in ways that cannot always be anticipate beforehand, creating new ways of democratic coexistence.

By critically bringing Rosa's analysis of our contemporary situation into educational terrains, the four symposium contributions are developed as philosophical arguments with educational implications. Taken together, the symposium offers sensory-embodied concepts and aesthetic metaphors to educational research and practice to identify the renewed pedagogical geometries, teacherly gestures, and ‘pedagogical relationscapes’ that the discursive shift from education as (personal) resource to education as (shared and embodied) resonance and relationality entails.

Biesta, G. J. J. (2022). How to Overcome Instrumentalism without Giving Up on Democracy. Educational Theory 72 (3):319-331. Cavarero, A. (2016). Inclinations: a critique of rectitude. Stanford University Press. Honig, B. (2017). Public things: democracy in disrepair (1st edition.) New York: Fordham University Press. Manning, E. (2012). Relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: a sociology of our relationship to the world. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rosa, H. & Endres, W. (2016). Resonanzpädagogik: wenn es im Klassenzimmer knistert. Weinheim: Beltz. Todd, S. (2023). The touch of the present. Educational Encounters, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Senses. New York: SUNY Press. Vlieghe J. and Zamojski P. (2022). Teacherly Gestures as an Ontological Dimension of Politics: On the Need of Commonising in an Age of Pervasive Privatization. Revista de Educación 395 January-March 2022, pp. 109-128.