Love, between curriculum and pedagogy

One idea I try to explore with Initial Teacher Educators is the importance of love in education. I believe love is important in relation to both the topics we teach, and the people we teach them to. In this blogpost, I want to articulate how one feeds into the other, and consider the role of the teacher in this mediation.

I sometimes have my students watch ‘My Octopus Teacher’ as a homework activity exploring the role of love in science. The protagonist of the film famously develops love, and a kind of relationship with an octopus, who he keeps visiting every day in a kelp forest off the coast of South Africa for an entire year. The film is educationally interesting for many reasons, as it opens up a lot of questions, such as: should he be interfering in that ecosystem? how was this actually being filmed, and what was the tension between trying to capture the relationship and the actual relationship? but also perhaps about what seems like his neglectful relationship with his own son. If such and other questions come up, I will surely make space for the discussion. But my intention is more straightforward. I want people to think about how emotions propelled his quest to know the octopus and wed into his decisions on how to attend to his ongoing understanding of octopus ecology. The protagonist is not a scientist but he quickly finds himself poring into the minutiae of scientific journal articles and wrestling with practical questions about what to do, especially when there is some conflict between such knowledge and what his heart might be telling him.

It is a particular story where a particular kind of love (eros, as the desire to know and connect with an other) wins over another kind of love (the agapic care that might lead him to save his friend from the bite of the pyjama shark). But it clearly opens the door for considering how love can guide the acquisition and application of knowledge. It is a different kind of emotion than those often associated with scientific research in capitalistic contexts, where one might prefer and feel more comfortable with emotions such as the desire for certainty, the joy of creating new things, or the exhilaration of risk, competition, and the prospects of wealth. The film works to open the door for a broader conversation, in part because no one doubts the authenticity of the protagonist. He wears his emotions on his sleeve and one sees clearly how they compel his inquiry and participation in his subject.

Doing so raises questions about what role emotions, and specifically different kinds of love, might play in the curriculum. Do children care about things in the world? Can they be invited to explore their love of things, new and old? What are the challenges and opportunities for teachers, and how to proceed? Because I primarily work with biology educators, it leads to questions about how the biological curriculum could be refashioned to support, invite and deepen love for other beings and processes in the living world.

However, because I teach teacher educators, pedagogy is always close on the heels of any discussion of curriculum. And so I invite the pivot to considering whether love also can motivate classroom practice, considering people don’t just encounter more-than-humans such as octopuses, but also each other? Do we learn more about our students and support them more effectively simply by caring about who they are, and how they will flourish, and what role we play in that? After all, there is an ecology in the classroom as there is in the kelp forest.

One way of thinking about the interplay between classroom relations and topic is to think of pedagogy and curriculum as a mode of form/content dynamic. If the topic is loving another but the manner of exploring that topic is at odds with it, then the students are likely to learn a very disjointed message (consciously or otherwise). There is the possibility of one symbiotically supporting the other, such that how we learn to love in one context can be tutorage for how we do so in another. But the gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ in teaching needs to be exposed, pointed to and played with, for these important questions to come up.

The distinction between pedagogy and curriculum melts into that of background and foreground, but with a twist. While we may think that the ‘what’ is our biology topic, and the ‘how’ is the pedagogy (which includes the classroom relations), this is only so when attention is directed at the topic. When attention shifts to the classroom relations, those relations become the ‘what’ and the curricular topic becomes the ‘how’. Sometimes we explore how to live with other species through how we live together as humans. Other times we explore how to live with other humans through interrogating living with other species.

I think it is important to be able to gestalt switch between foreground and background, or foci and context in teaching, rather than reifying certain labels such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘pedagogy’. This is not just because the latter inevitably leads to demoting one or the other according to priorities. It is also because once we realise teaching is a series of moments of foregrounding one thing and backgrounding another, both for and by the teacher and the students, how one experiences the sequence of the series of experiences comes to matter. They are no longer seen as partitioned unique dimensions (like form separated by an infinite gulf from content) or parcels of encounter closed off from one another in time (we did this and then that, and then this other thing). Rather, the (aesthetic) relationship within and between the experiences comes to matter, like how different motifs and movements follow one another in a piece of music. The teacher can then attend to the relationship between what is foregrounded and backgrounded, and the various shifts of focus, and what that teaches through its congruences, disjuncts, rhythms, and oscillations. This is partly how I use the term ‘artistry of teaching’, as featured in my chapters in the upcoming book (Biesta and Affifi 2026).

Does our love for each other in the classroom inform how we approach loving the creatures we study? Or vice versa? And how does paying attention to the interaction between our attitudes towards classroom relations and those towards other species alter our ability to develop connections between them?