The Passion of Education

This chapter explores what the shift from learning to study, studying, and studenting implies for our understanding of teaching and the teacher and can it make a contribution to overcoming the "learnification" of educational discourse and practice that has significantly sidelined teaching and the teacher. The chapter discusses the notion of "sense making" and the question whether in education everything ultimately relies on the sense-making processes and activities of the student. It presents the distinction between sense making and affection in order to explore to what degree sense making is "issued" by the self and where, how, and to what degree there is an element of affection that is fundamentally beyond the "hold" of the self and would therefore best be understood as "passion". The chapter suggests the education becomes a hermeneutical act where the student—as learner—is in the center and where the teacher and the content of the teaching appear as objects for sense making for the students.