Teaching Beyond Dread

This book explores how teaching endures in the age of pervasive dread. It asks: How does teaching refuse and counter dread's grip? What new stories of teaching might be told beyond the culture of dread?

Dread is the prevailing mood of this era. Dread is an affliction of minds, bodies, and social life. Climate chaos, spiraling inequality, loss of community, cynicism, and escalating attacks on public schools, universities, and educators are all contribute to pervasive dread. This book explores the persistence of teaching in this era of dread. The chapters examine the context of teaching in a time of dread and touch upon different valences of race and pedagogy, as well as pedagogy in relation to global crises of capitalism, technology, and ecology. Taken together, they explore how teaching endures over dread and examine how teaching might be rethought as a creative force for imagination over fatalism, reciprocity over exploitation, thought over fundamentalism, belonging over atomization, love over nihilism, mutuality over narcissism, care over hatred, joy over despair, democracy over fascism, and hope over dread.

This thought-provoking volume will be a key resource for educators, scholars, artists, and activists alike. It was originally published as a special issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Alexander J. Means is Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.

Yuko Ida is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.

Matthew Myers is a Masters student in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA.