Scholastic Atmospheres: A Commentary on Presenting and Representing Worlds in an Everyday Lesson

In this article, we approach the old philosophical question about the relatedness of image and reality, language and world, and word and thing from a pedagogical point of view by attending to how teachers work to present the world out there to students in the school classroom. We begin with Mollenhauer's distinction between educational regimes that present the world to the young with very little mediation and his diagnosis of the contemporary Western educational regime as one that reproduces the world through stylized re‐presentations that are shown to students in the separate pedagogic arrangement of the classroom. Drawing on a passage from Foucault's This is Not a Pipe , we argue that the (theoretical) divide between educational regimes of presentation and representation might be too strong in the context of the school because it fails to pay attention to the key components of classroom education, including the objects of the classroom, activities of students, and pedagogical work of the teacher. In the classroom, there is a vibrant school life, and there appear to be atmospheric forces at work that can bring represented worlds to life. These atmospheric forces are able to turn the world out there into an exciting place that is worthy of discovery and curiosity.