Emotional Configurations Across Learning Environments

Building on Vea’s (2000b) emotional configurations perspective, this symposium examines emotion and learning across a range of environments representing science education and explicitly politicized contexts. An emotional configurations perspective denaturalizes supposedly individual, internal, and discrete emotion states and instead foregrounds the ways that participants in social activity coordinate relationships between feeling, sense-making, and practice. In these four studies, we argue that emotionality should be more centrally interrogated in learning sciences research because it shapes what is learned and how learning unfolds, and itself becomes part of learning outcomes. The combined work makes theoretical contributions by interweaving emotion within sociocultural theories of learning and methodological contributions by sharing productive approaches to centering emotion as an object of analysis.