Emotions Differentiate Opportunities: Investigating Emotions as a Component in Social Sustainability in Primary School

Abstract

This chapter focuses on emotionality in primary schools as a dimension of social sustainability. The chapter contributes to the discussion of social sustainability by elucidating how emotionality has significant influence on children’s engagement in primary school. Because emotions tend to be neglected in the general striving for an equal and just school system, this chapter advocates for the need of an increased focus on emotional sustainability within primary schools. By unfolding an empirical example of a testing situation in a Danish primary school, the chapter investigates how specific arrangements of classroom teaching promote certain emotions. The chapter shows that pupils do not have equal access to specific emotions. In the same classroom setting feelings of success and failure are distributed to different pupils, thus generating ´strong´ as well as ‘vulnerable’ pupils. The chapter argues that emotions both differentiate and stigmatise, hence imposing different opportunities on the pupils. The focus on distribution of emotions as a dividing practice reveals that emotions are a necessary component if we want to understand how social inequality is produced and maintained in a school setting. This leads to a concluding discussion emphasising that equality – as a normative principle of social sustainability – is not the only ethical strive in primary school, as objectives of inclusion and care challenge the endeavour of equality among pupils.