Cognition, affect and relationality: experiences of student teachers in a course on multiculturalism in primary teacher education in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This article presents an analysis of journal entries of student teachers in a course on multicultural and language studies in primary education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which was informed by a discursive strand of postcolonial theory, in particular Gayatri C. Spivak’s ideas of education ‘to-come’ as an ‘un-coercive rearrangement of desires’ towards an ethical imperative towards the Other, ‘before will’. We start this article with a contextualization of the course and an outline the theoretical background that informed the course aims and strategies. Next, we selectively use affect theory to analyse the learning journals of eight students in the course. Our conclusion raises questions related to the relationship between structures of cognition, affect and relationality and highlights the role of crisis in learning processes that intend to equip learners to reconfigure their imaginaries and their capacity to relate to difference.