Emotional work for more holistic and transformative Education for Democracy

The pressing global landscape with its tangible crises such as polarisation and ecological disruption exposes limits in Education for Democracy (EfD) frameworks that still emphasise cognition over emotion. We argue that Transformative Learning (TL) can offer a basis for EfD to respond to these challenges. Recent literature emphasises the significance of emotions in TL, proposing that emotional engagement is central for developing thinking skills and competences that are necessary for addressing ‘wicked problems’ and sustaining democratic cultures. We discuss using emotional work as a metaperspective of the emotional engagement in learning through which learners actively experience, optimally stay with, and reflect on discomfort while negotiating embodied and social dimensions of change. We explore aspects of the theoretical foundations and the dynamic interplay between emotions, reflection, TL and EfD. Our theoretical paper advocates for a more nuanced and holistic approach to EfD that fully embraces the emotional and embodied dimensions of learning. We discuss the inseparability of emotions from cognition, and how to understand them as embodied, socially constructed, and explicitly integrated into transformative educational practices. We conclude with suggestions for future research and pedagogical practices, incorporating emotional work, to produce more emotionally engaging learning environments supporting individual and societal change.