Volume 20, Number 4, 2026 Special Issue: Joy-Centred Pedagogy: Hope for Hard Times Guest-edited by Eileen Kogl Camfield

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In a time in which the academic world mirrors the challenges and crises of the wider world, we consider and advocate for joy-centred pedagogy. Studying three educational spaces under one departmental umbrella, we connect the sensual and experiential aspects of attuning to joy. We share the ways in which joy is not a destination. Rather, joy emerges in higher educational settings when we share in the practices that are connective and focused. We expound on three examples of joy-centred pedagogy in higher education: a sex-ed learning placement for pre-service teachers taught and experienced through the lens of pleasure and joy; joy/pleasure-centred bubble painting within an arts education research group; and a joy/pleasure-centred education graduate course where bodies push against the edge of AI. Themes such as experiential sensuous learning, care in community, and curiosity serve to help identify what incites joy in teaching and learning.

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Many faculty report increasing demands within higher education, including larger class sizes, pressure associated with the broader political climate, increasing student distress, and greater difficulty engaging students (APA, 2023; Boamah et al., 2022; Fernández-Suárez et al., 2021; Wiley, 2024). These conditions have been associated with increased stress and burnout among faculty (Boamah et al., 2022; Leiter & Maslach, 2004). These pressures may contribute to a tightening of classroom climates as instructors and students adapt to increasingly constrained learning environments. This article proposes playful pedagogy as one approach for shifting classroom conditions. I present the idea of overlapping climates (i.e., attentional, power and authorship, social and relational, and meaning-making climates) and describe how play can create climate shifts that positively influence how students experience learning and how instructors experience teaching. Tangible examples are given to show how play can loosen overly controlled environments, capture attention, and invite co-construction of meaning. As these conditions shift, engagement and joy become more likely. The joy that arises in classrooms can become a subtle form of resistance within a system that produces stress and burnout, and that tends to prioritize performance over humanity.

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The world we currently experience is characterized by acceleration and change. Western ideals of individualistic success, along with surrounding social structures, leads to alienation (Rosa, 2019). The purpose of education is to prepare students for the world they will encounter, but what world? We argue that rather than preparing students for a disconnected world focused on the individual, instead we aim for students to contribute to a changing future with a foundation of resilience, belonging, and connection. Hartmut Rosa (2019) has proposed the concept of resonance as a counterpoint to alienation – as an alert and present willingness to enter dialogue with the world. This view of presence has relevance to pedagogy through joy: joy becomes essential for resilience in an alienating age. This essay explores how Rosa’s concept of resonance can provide a conceptual architecture for a joy-centred pedagogy. Drawing on Ross Gay's work on joy and its interaction with Rosa, we suggest that resonant pedagogical encounters create a reciprocal relationship with joy: an emergent quality of relational, dialogical, and meaningful engagements. We argue that resonance-oriented learning environments can foster the capacities students need for an uncertain future by developing attitudes, relational sensitivity, curiosity, and agency.

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Civic joy emerges in classrooms in which students practice mutual recognition and collective meaning-making. It offers an alternative to nihilism and apathy, generating not consensus or sameness but a sense of belonging. Making space for civic joy in political and civic education settings does not require professors to be entertaining or fun, but to allow students to discuss topics of real concern to them in ways that allow them to prioritize their membership in a shared world. Civic joy offers students a taste of being in a democratic community, directly benefiting students and indirectly benefiting democracy.

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Academic writing instruction often positions argumentation and persuasion as the primary modes of civic discourse, reinforcing adversarial forms of public discourse beyond the classroom. This article argues that writing pedagogy centred on joy can reimagine civic writing, orienting it toward relational learning, ethical representation, and writing as a way of being (Yagelski, 2009) rather than writing designed “to persuade, to argue, to win” (Neville, 2023, p. 94). Drawing on practitioner inquiry and a world-building civic education framework, this study examined how teacher candidates engaged in journalistic learning as a third space (Gutierrez et al., 1995; Moje et al., 2009) to bridge school and out-of-school literacies. Findings show that listening—requiring participants to suspend assumptions and attend carefully to others—reshaped beliefs and relational habits for teacher candidates. Joy emerged not despite this labour, but because of it, signaling deep engagement and pointing toward more ethical, relational civic futures.

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This article examines collaborative creativity as a joy-centred practice that faculty can cultivate amid the pressures of academic life. Drawing on our own long-term collaboration as the primary site of inquiry, we define collaborative creativity as a relational, reiterative process through which meaning is co-constructed in response to the shared successes and challenges of faculty life, positioning struggle not as an individual burden but as an occasion for collective invention. Methodologically, we employed social reflection, thematic analysis, and poetry inquiry, with poems crafted from interview data functioning as both analytic tools and affective representations of snippets of connection. Our findings reveal joy as something that arises not through seeking it directly but through doing meaningful work together — and burnout as a systemic phenomenon that collaborative creativity interrupts by turning faculty outward, toward one another and toward the in-between spaces where curiosity and creativity quietly take hold. We conclude with invitations for faculty to take up collaborative creativity in their own professional lives, offering it not as a prescriptive model but as an honest account of what might be possible.

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Joy-centred pedagogy is often dismissed as an “add-on” to serious teaching; however, in deficit-driven policy climates, educators increasingly describe schooling as scripted, dehumanizing, and joyless. This qualitative study examines how joy can be intentionally cultivated in teacher education as an embodied resource for agency, justice, and sustainability. Situated within narrative a/r/tography, this research draws on arts-informed inquiry in a graduate-level teacher education course in which participants created collage-based “patches and quilts” to render their teaching identities through visual metaphor and written reflection. Analysis of this multimodal corpus revealed four interrelated dimensions of joy as both affect and action: (a) inward renewal through reflective identity work; (b) refusal and navigation amid systemic constraints, including high-stakes testing and prescriptive curricula; (c) justice-oriented commitments, including Black joy and culturally sustaining approaches to language and culture; and (d) enacted pedagogy through practices that centre student voice, belonging, and creative, critical literacies. Findings suggest that arts-based inquiry creates a third-space sanctuary where educators can name harm, collectively carry tension, and reimagine rigour as academic vigour. In dialogue with Gay (2022) and Lorde, this study positions joy-centred pedagogy as a disciplined, justice-bound practice that transforms affect into agentic, humanizing teaching.

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Black school leaders are exemplars of joy-centered leadership that is needed in schools today. K-12 principals face unprecedented challenges in the post-COVID era. Specifically, Black male principals experience extreme challenges due to deficit framing that has informed hiring and retention practices, promotion, job roles and job-related stress unique to Black male principals. Despite these challenges, the Black principals in this collective case study demonstrated a “possible joy” approach to leadership while experiencing marginal mattering (minimal recognition; insignificance) and partial mattering (selective mattering based on talent/skills) in K-12 spaces. In this article, the author conceptualizes “possible joy” as a confluence of dispositions and characteristics comprised of tenets from Black joy and Black masculine caring. The data analysis revealed themes of “possible joy” through resistance, care for students, and leadership rooted in core values and conviction. Implications for K-12 administrators and educational leadership programs are discussed.

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In this essay, we trouble the notion of joy in teaching and learning. We trouble it because we do not want to offer another status quo, shiny intervention grounded in hegemonic hierarchy. We trouble it because we want to explore how to co-narrate joy in a way that lets us, our colleagues, and our students realize our “magical” capacity, to borrow Sylvia Wynter’s word. Writing as three educators in a single analytic voice, with first-person narratives in which our standpoints diverge, we ask: joy for whom, to what end, and at what cost? We enter through the debate over generative AI because it reveals how students and educators are often positioned as objects of policy. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Achille Mbembe, and Lauren Berlant, we examine how institutional calls for joy, if not critically interrogated, can function as affective governance, shifting responsibility for structural conditions onto individuals and their emotional performance. We then read joy through traditions that have long refused to separate it from struggle–Black and abolitionist thought, Chicane and Latina thought, and West and North African Sufi teachings. We close with questions, rather than how-to’s, that invite our readers to reflect on what joy is worth defending and working toward.

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Joy-centred pedagogy has gained recent traction as educators seek alternatives to cynicism, disengagement, and burnout. Yet much of the existing discourse considers joy as an affective or motivational outcome rather than a condition grounded in epistemology. This paper offers a theoretical analysis of joy-centred pedagogy through a lens of interdisciplinarity in education (Babich, 2020), positioning interdisciplinarity not as a curricular arrangement but as an epistemological orientation that resists the fragmentation and proceduralization of knowledge common in modern educational systems. Drawing on the Systematic Oppression of Knowledge and Epistemology (SOKE), this paper argues that epistemic fragmentation produces forms of alienation that foreclose the emergence of pedagogical joy. In contrast, interdisciplinary ways of knowing reintegrate meaning, agency, and relational understanding, creating conditions under which joy can emerge as an epistemic consequence rather than a pedagogical technique. By synthesizing interdisciplinarity and joy-centred pedagogy, this paper reframes joy as an outcome of epistemic coherence and agentic engagement. Furthermore, this analysis provides a grounding of joy-centred pedagogy as a theory of knowledge that supports educational vigour, care, and resilience by positioning interdisciplinarity as a foundational condition for cultivating joyful learning communities in hard times.

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This conceptual article explores joy as a relational and pedagogical force in higher education, examining its connection to student motivation, well-being, and belonging through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Drawing on SDT’s core psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, the paper argues that joy is best understood not simply as an individual emotional outcome but as an emergent property of learning environments that either support or frustrate these needs. From this perspective, joy arises in inclusive classroom communities shaped by shared learning, mutual care, and collective meaning-making, while its absence may reflect disconnection, constraint, or diminished competence. The paper further argues that cultivating joy-centred pedagogy is not only a matter of effective teaching but also an ethical responsibility, particularly in light of inequitable access to need-supportive educational environments. By connecting SDT with research on joy in education, this article offers a conceptual framework for understanding how educational environments shape the conditions under which joy becomes possible and identifies implications for educators and institutions seeking to create more inclusive, relational, and meaningful learning experiences.

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Joy in higher education is often treated as incidental, yet it can be intentionally cultivated through the design of the learning environment, particularly via student–faculty co-creation. Drawing on a redesigned undergraduate Positive Psychology course, this work examines how involving students as partners in shaping the syllabus, assessments, and participation structures transforms the emotional and intellectual climate of the classroom. Rather than framing joy as entertainment or ease, it is conceptualized as relational and emergent, arising through agency, trust, shared responsibility, and productive struggle. Four key conditions supporting the emergence of joy are identified: consequential voice, shared responsibility, relational trust, and engagement through difficulty. Evidence from both student and instructor reflections illustrates how co-creation shifts learning from compliance to commitment and from isolation to community. While tensions remain, co-creation is presented as a practical and adaptable pedagogical framework. Joy, in this context, becomes a renewable resource that signals meaningful engagement and underscores the need to rethink classroom structures in response to student disengagement and faculty burnout.

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In this article, I argue that one of the principle ways that unessay assignments bring joy to college educators is by creating opportunities for us to work with students who are creatively and meaningfully engaging in our course content—the research fields and disciplinary tools of our own scholarly passions—using an assessment modality of their own choice. After an overview of what an unessay assignment entails, I describe how it facilitates unlearning passivity for students and unlearning didactic teaching and the transmission model of education for faculty. The unessay creates more freedom for learners to explore their own unique ideas and to find personally relevant meaning in an academic subject, making teaching with unessays an intellectually and pedagogically rewarding, even joyful, task for professors—something we all need more of in “the age of AI.”

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This reflective practitioner essay examines joy-centred pedagogy as a shift from classroom management to human facilitation in higher education. Drawing on practitioner experience in performing arts teacher education and scholarship on student development, self-determination theory, and joy-centred pedagogy, it explores the limits of control-oriented approaches when working with emerging adult learners. Rather than responding to disengagement, inconsistency, or uncertainty with tighter regulation, the essay argues for joy-centred facilitation as a pedagogical stance grounded in relational clarity, shared responsibility, reflection, and intellectual risk-taking. Guided by the principle “if you don’t bend, you’ll break,” the essay traces how one practitioner-scholar recalibrated teaching practices by moving from enforcement to dialogue, from compliance to participation, and from depleting rigour to academic vigour. Joy is framed not as ease, charisma, or positivity, but as a sustaining pedagogical resource that emerges when students are supported in struggling, revising, questioning, and growing together. Ultimately, the essay argues that sustainable, humanizing pedagogy requires educators to practice responsiveness, reconsider authority, and facilitate the humans in the room.

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Many conversations about generative AI in the classroom often demonstrate a deficit mindset toward students, with assumptions that AI has led to students never completing their own assignments or having their own creative thoughts. As a university writing instructor, I have found these concerns to be largely unfounded. My students are finding their own authentic voices and producing original work, while using AI as a tool to help them meet learning outcomes in ways that comply with university research ethics. In the era of AI—when assignments, thoughts, and opinions can be easily outsourced to generative AI—it is critical that students understand the importance and value of having their own original thoughts and opinions, and the dangers of outsourcing them to an algorithm. Yet, encouraging students to find and use their own authentic voices through a well-developed curriculum, one that both fosters student self-efficacy and incorporates ethical use of AI, can be a joyful endeavour for an instructor, as it ultimately leads to joy for students. This article introduces collegiate-level curricular activities, some involving the use of AI, that help foster the development of authentic student voices in the composition classroom.

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This paper argues that assessment reform in the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) era should move beyond defensive approaches focused primarily on preventing misconduct or detecting AI use. Synthesizing scholarship on assessment validity, relational and compassionate assessment, third space theory, and AI agents, this conceptual paper proposes joyful assessment as a rigorous and learner-centered framework for assessment design in the GenAI era. Joyful assessment is defined as assessment that is safe, emotionally responsive, empowering, and supportive of student agency. The paper examines how AI agents designed for specific educational purposes can support joyful assessment by creating low-stakes opportunities for practice, feedback, reflection, personalization, and multimodal demonstration of learning. It further argues that when implemented within relational and ethically governed environments AI agents can help mediate third space assessment environments that connect formal curriculum with students’ interests, experiences, and learning needs. The paper demonstrates these ideas through a practical example and concludes by identifying ethical considerations and future research directions related to responsible design, learner experience, equity, validity, and relational assessment practice.

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As evidenced by the grim gazes and demeanors of students as they quietly settle into their seats for the day, the Polycrisis, defined as the “…multiple co-occurring, causally entangled crises with synergistic and cascading effects on multiple systems degrading humanity’s prospects…” (Rakowski et al., 2025), is clearly infecting, exacerbating, and curdling the potential of our young people trying to carve their way through an increasingly unstable world. In the face of such iron frost upon the world stage, educators have a genuine opportunity to reinvigorate hope and joy for learning by thawing the perceptual chill with pedagogical practices that enflame warmth and laughter within the classroom. To this end, I will draw on empirical evidence supporting embodied cognition, highlighting the sociocultural interplay between physicality and mental states (Macrine & Fugate, 2022) to illustrate what I call ‘Cozy Pedagogy’. This novel form of classroom community building includes practices such as sharing tea from around the world with students in order to infuse warmth and wellbeing into our classroom dynamics, building new and lasting relationships for collective resilience.

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While joy is increasingly valorized as a pedagogical instrument for identity formation, its collective manifestation as a bulwark against ideological fragility remains undertheorized. Moving beyond individualistic affective states, this phenomenological inquiry examines the relational "blooming" of joy—conceptualized through Ross Gay’s notion of shared struggle and Gholdy Muhammad’s culturally responsive framework—among female students at Pondok Pesantren Salafiyah Syafi'iyah Situbondo. Through in-depth engagement with 40 participants, the study deconstructs organizational slogans not as mere rhetorical devices, but as affective anchors that cultivate radical inclusion and collective efficacy.The findings reveal that the Pesantren’sresilience against extremist narratives does not emerge from explicit counter-pedagogy, but from an ontological model of "Asambung,"a unique relational connectedness that integrates vertical (tauhidic), genealogical, and contextual dimensions of the self. Unlike Western positive psychology’s emphasis on subjective experience, Asambung situates the individual within a profound network of transcendence and communal duty. This study argues that joy-centred pedagogy, mediated through these relational speech acts, effectively fills the identity voids targeted by extremist ideologies. This research offers cross-cultural expansions of counselling theory—including the Asambung model of triadic relational identity and the concept of Joyful Accountability positioning collective joy as a protective mechanism against extremism.

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While educational disaster response typically prioritizes infrastructure restoration, there remains a critical deficit in psychosocial interventions that cultivate joy to address recurrent climate trauma. This study investigates the utility of happiness dispositions (joy, humour, satisfaction) as culturally mediated pedagogical resources for recovering academic motivation and resiliency among learners in disaster-prone regions. Using a qualitative exploratory design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 tertiary students selected via purposive sampling in high-risk zones, and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal that a joyful classroom climate is a vital foundational element. Establishing psychological safety acts as a catalyst, shifting students' neurobiology out of "survival mode" and freeing cognitive resources for learning. Emergent themes indicate culturally grounded humour and teacher relatability function as cognitive scaffolds for emotional anchoring. Aligning positive affect with academic material enhances retention while deconstructing fear-based academic hierarchies. This relational process, rooted in kapwa (shared identity), allows participants to temporarily suspend their survivor narratives and reclaim their student identities. These outcomes suggest effective crisis education requires a paradigm shift toward joy-centred, trauma-informed teaching, emphasizing that relational authenticity and positive psychological capital are critical for sustainable academic continuity and localized teacher preparation.

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The current educational context, characterized by increasingly diverse learner profiles, makes classroom behaviour management particularly complex. Teachers face a wide range of challenges, from minor disruptions to more serious behavioural issues, which may negatively affect both classroom climate and the well-being of students and teachers. This study is based on a survey of 76 secondary school teachers from various disciplines who work with students exhibiting behavioural difficulties. A mixed-methods approach was adopted, combining qualitative and quantitative data. The study examines teachers’ classroom management strategies and their contribution to fostering a positive classroom climate, enhancing student engagement and motivation, and supporting emotional well-being and joy in learning. It also explores the effectiveness of teacher training, the challenges encountered, and the need for professional support, resources, and development. Based on the findings, the study proposes recommendations to support the development of an inclusive, joy-centred, and resilient pedagogy that promotes student flourishing and a positive learning environment. Overall, the study highlights the importance of integrating emotional and social dimensions into teaching practices to create classrooms that are both effective and supportive for all learners.

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Using a qualitative multiple-case study design, this study examines how joy-centred translanguaging pedagogy promotes inclusion and justice in multilingual ESL classrooms in Pakistan. Grounded in the framework of translanguaging space, the study draws on classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with 2 teachers and 4 students. The analysis focuses on linguistic belonging, participation, language hierarchies, and student voice. Findings indicate that translanguaging supports identity validation and engagement; however, its effectiveness depends significantly on teachers’ affective and relational practices. Classrooms characterized by empathy, respect, and supportive feedback enabled greater student participation and a stronger sense of belonging. The study concludes that inclusion and justice emerge through the intersection of translanguaging practices and positive classroom relationships, positioning joy as central to equitable multilingual pedagogy.

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Amid persistent resource shortages and exclusionary instructional practices, learners with dyslexia in mainstream classrooms are often portrayed through deficit-focused narratives that emphasise struggle and remediation. This study examines how joy functions as a pedagogical tool within inclusive teaching strategies in Zimbabwean primary schools. The study adopted a qualitative design involving twenty-four (24) primary school teachers from Chivi District, selected through convenience sampling based on their experience teaching learners with dyslexia across Grades 1 to 7. Data were generated through classroom observations and semi-structured interviews, enabling an in-depth exploration of teachers’ practices and perspectives. Findings indicate that teachers can intentionally cultivate joy through relational care, adaptable instruction, and supportive learning environments. Joy was specifically fostered through multimodal teaching approaches, collaborative activities, and the normalisation of learner differences, allowing learners with dyslexia to engage meaningfully and experience success. These practices enhanced learner participation and agency while also strengthening teachers’ professional commitment and sense of purpose within challenging contexts. The analysis reveals that joy is actively produced through deliberate inclusive teaching choices that challenge deficit-based models of disability. By foregrounding joy in inclusive education, the study contributes to discussions on justice-oriented pedagogy and reframes inclusion as a space of possibility rather than mere accommodation. Overall, the study argues that a joy-centred approach offers a valuable pathway for promoting both learner development and teacher resilience in mainstream classrooms.

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This study examines how joy is cultivated in a primary school Makerspace through the implementation of joy-centred pedagogy. While innovative learning environments are often assumed to naturally generate positive emotional experiences, limited research has investigated the pedagogical conditions that intentionally foster joyful learning in primary education contexts. Grounded in experiential learning theory, positive psychology, self-determination theory, and maker education, the study adopts a design-based research approach to explore how structured learning experiences can support the emergence of joy during hands-on learning activities. The intervention was conducted in a primary school Makerspace where students engaged in collaborative project-based tasks involving design, experimentation, and iterative problem-solving. Data were collected through student surveys, classroom observations, and reflective artifacts and analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The findings reveal that joy was cultivated through four interrelated pedagogical conditions: meaningful challenge, collaborative interaction, learner autonomy, and opportunities for creative expression. These conditions enabled students to experience curiosity, confidence, and a sense of accomplishment while persisting in complex learning tasks. The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that joy is not merely an emotional outcome of engaging activities but a pedagogically designable mechanism that supports meaningful participation and sustained engagement in learning environments.

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Amid increasing student disengagement, emotional distress, and performance-driven science instruction, this paper examines joy-centred pedagogy as a critical mechanism for fostering students’ scientific sense-making and agency. Drawing on sociocultural and epistemic perspectives in science education, the study conceptualizes joy not as a peripheral emotional outcome but as an embodied, relational, and renewable epistemic resource that energizes learning. Using a mixed-methods design, data were collected from secondary science classrooms implementing inquiry-based, joy-centred instructional practices. Quantitative analyses examined the relationships among students’ experienced joy, scientific agency, epistemic engagement, and conceptual understanding, while qualitative data illuminated how joy emerged through collaborative inquiry, productive struggle, and engagement with uncertainty. Structural equation modelling revealed that joy significantly predicted students’ agency and epistemic engagement, which in turn mediated conceptual understanding. Qualitative findings further demonstrated that joy functioned as a form of collective care, enabling students to take intellectual risks, persist through difficulty, and experience science as meaningful rather than merely performative. The study argues that joy-centred pedagogy reframes scientific rigour as epistemic vigour, offering a powerful response to contemporary educational ill-being. Implications are discussed for science curriculum design, equity-oriented instruction, and the cultivation of learning environments where students can flourish through curiosity, solidarity, and shared sense-making.

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Traditional approaches to teaching genetics in life sciences have often failed to equip teachers with effective strategies for engaging learners with complex and abstract concepts. In contexts marked by teacher burnout, learner disengagement, and persistent conceptual difficulty, there is a growing need for professional development approaches that empower teachers with effective teaching and learning strategies. This article explores joy-centred pedagogy as a suitable approach to professional development of life sciences teachers through a university–school partnership. Guided by Placed-Based Education Theory, the study examines how outdoor, community-based teaching strategies supported teachers’ understanding of genetics and revitalized their pedagogical practice. The professional development initiative involved demonstrations and hands-on learning in a local garden and cattle kraal, where teachers engaged in simulations of genetic crosses using natural materials and observed inherited characteristics in cattle. A qualitative design employed purposive sampling of 20 Grade 10–12 life sciences teachers. The thematic analysis of data revealed renewed confidence, heightened motivation, and deeper conceptual understanding, as complex terminology became accessible through experiential engagement. The findings suggest that experiential, joy-centred professional development fosters understanding of complex terminology. Outdoor and community-based learning emerges as a culturally responsive and transformative strategy for teaching challenging life sciences topics.