Affect, Aesthetics, and the Pedagogical Encounter

In this blog post, Hugh McLean develops ideas inspired by his reading of Irving Epstein’s (2024) book, bringing concepts of affect into conversation with aesthetics in education.

‘Education is simultaneously an act of knowing, a political act, and an artistic event.’ Paulo Freire (1985)

Irving Epstein’s (2024) book Education, Affect and Film, which I review in the Comparative Education Review (vol. 69, no. 4, 2025), treats education, affect, and film as an integrated phenomenon rather than three distinct domains. Irving Epstein reenvisages learning as a series of encounters involving intensity, meaning-making, assemblage, and contingency – his pedagogical reworking of Spinosa’s and Deleuze’s notions of affect.

Affect has become an important idea, mostly in North American education theory. At its simplest, it concerns changes in capacity – to perceive, to think, and to act – that occur through encounters in life. For Spinoza, affect was what a body could do, not what it felt or thought, since he allowed no separation between body and mind. Deleuze developed affect as a philosophy of transformation through encounter, opening a rich line of enquiry around education as encounter that contemporary educators – from Brian Massumi to Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jan Jagodzinski, and, of course, Irving Epstein – have taken forward.

While some of this language may seem obscure rather than practical, it describes experiences educators are very familiar with in everyday practice: that thought often moves before full cognition; that learning is relational rather than a simple subject–object exchange; and that learning involves openness and unpredictability as much as it involves certainty and closure. For Irving Epstein, these are dimensions of affect. I find it useful to think about what they reveal about aesthetics – a word I employ several times in my brief review of his book, and one he does not use once across its 249 pages. 

In this short blog, my purpose is to suggest what Irving Epstein’s theoretical framework allows us to see about aesthetics and pedagogy – particularly the role of allure, form, craft, and fit in sustaining epistemic enquiry. Affect theory offers many insights into how learning happens; thinking through aesthetics in education helps foreground how teaching and pedagogy actually work to make learning happen.

Let’s explore what we might mean by aesthetics in pedagogy. If education sets purposes and orientations, syllabi lay out content, and pedagogy shapes the immediate learning encounter, aesthetics names how that pedagogical encounter holds attention, meaning, and openness together – and how learners develop the craft to recall, reproduce, and rework it. We shall do this by looking briefly at allure, form, craft, and fit, each in turn.

• Allure is not spectacle: it is the pull of an idea that invites sustained attention without dictating meaning in advance. Swinging on a doorframe when you enter a classroom may grab attention, but this is entertainment, not aesthetics. 

In science, it might be the elegance of the Poisson distribution – how a simple structure reveals patterned randomness in the world. In the humanities, it might be the way the San people of Southern Africa describe the Milky Way as the Backbone of the Night: an image that holds meaning without completing it. In both cases, allure sustains attention and invites enquiry.

• Form concerns how learning is shaped – how complexity is shaped so it can be encountered and grasped as complexity without being reduced.

A Venn diagram is not a good model for a biological cell because it falsely suggests separable, static parts rather than dynamic processes. In history, a powerful narrative can hold explanation and complexity together: the Opium Wars, seen with some 160 years of hindsight, reveal both the strengths and fragilities of empire – a diminished Britain and a rising China entangled in the same story.

• Craft involves the development and practice of skills – applying knowledge through repetition, variation, thought, and effort until form and judgement become embodied. It is less about innate ability than about learning how to do something well.

Quadratic equations are learned less through flashes of insight than through doing homework – practising until structure and logic becomes familiar and easier to reproduce. Turning a somersault is as much about mental perseverance, careful coaching, and repeated attempts as it is about physical ability. In this sense, education develops craft: the capacity to act competently, not just to understand.

• Fit concerns how learning lands – whether an explanation works for these learners, at this moment, and whether it productively unsettles as much as it reassures. Fit is relational: it depends on context, readiness, and relevance.

For example, decolonising education in the Global North is unlikely to be effective if it begins by simply telling students their minds are colonised, or by relying on guilt as a motivator. Fit asks a different question: how do craft, form, and allure make ideas intelligible, troubling, or compelling in the first place – and what kinds of enquiry do they invite next?

If I began this blog with reflections on my review of Irving Epstein’s Education, Affect and Film before turning them to aesthetics and education, it is because the book opened doors for me. Like Abbas Kiarostami – for whom the camera was a teacher that refuses to teach – Irving Epstein opens doors and expects the reader to walk through. In doing so, I effectively abandoned the idea of a review of my review and turned instead to the questions the book itself prompts.

While education theory is often articulated in the Global North, pedagogical knowledge has long been generated through practice across the Global South under conditions of constraint, necessity, and invention. What aesthetics in education looks like – the landscape I begin sketching here – involves ideas and practices that NORRAG members already employ. Its paths and vistas await further exploration, analysis and theorising; The South Also Knows is its North Star.

The Author

Hugh McLean is a South African based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and writes on education, aesthetics, activism, and film. He has worked across formal, non-formal, and global education spaces as a teacher, activist, and education funder. From 2006 to 2020, he established and directed a global education programme at the Open Society Foundations, focused on democratic participation in education, the right to education, and social accountability to defend education as a public good.