This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following postholocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes 'the crisis of traditions' and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from the past by returning to (a) the moral character of our existence and (b) our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values-which entails a belief in preexisting commonalities-and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not (yet) common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study.

As populations around the globe become increasingly culturally diverse, just inter-personal relations seem dependent on our ability to find new ways of communicating with people from other cultures whose values and linguistic strategies may vary from our own cultural practices. Hence, in the increasing body of literature on intercultural education, intercultural education means helping students to acquire the right language and communication skills for enabling mutual understanding and transformation between cultures. However, several post-colonial scholars have pointed out that there is a tendency to homogenise differences and neglect relations of power and the culturally untranslatable in the Western conception of language. This paper explores some implications of the post-colonial critique of intercultural education by following Luce Irigaray's writings on language and communication. Taking as its point of departure the Western 'common sense' conception of language as an instrument for communication and transfer of information, the paper first elaborates on the importance of exploring new ways of relating to language if we want to speak and listen to the other as other. It then offers a close reading of Martin Heidegger's existential analysis of the nature of language as Saying-Sowing and of Irigaray's response as she develops it in two of her later works. By way of conclusion the paper discusses how a more poetic and attentive listening could open up for a transformative and non-hierarchical communication in difference, and considers what implications this has for the promotion of social justice and pluralism in intercultural education.

This volume takes two different, albeit intertwined approaches. The first concerns a reformulation of aesthetics in education-one which highlights the sensory dimensions of educational experience. The second concerns a turn to the body and the senses as that which is deeply involved in practices of teaching and learning. Keywords Senses • Body • Embodyment • Aestethics • LivingThis Special Issue was conceived long before the word COVID became part of our daily lexicon. We thought even then (way back in 2018!) that the sensory aspects of education were under theorized, if not downright forgotten, in the increasingly performative cultures that mark educational institutions at all levels as well as in contemporary theoretical framings of education. The pandemic's presence in our lives has occasioned a series of difficult adjustments around the globe, both personally and educationally, that none of us could have foreseen and which has only served to increase our sensitivity to the issues we identified earlier. For instance, because the virus is transferred through social contact, we have been compelled to minimize social encounters, largely avoiding physical meetings, shaking hands, hugging one another, and travelling to meet family, colleagues and friends. Educational institutions have been heavily affected by the lack of physical social contact as students of all ages have been sent into various forms of educational isolation, excluding them from the regular bodily interactions and material conditions that comprise everyday life in schools, universities and other educational settings. Teaching has moved onto digital

In a time of cultural pluralism and legitimation crisis (Habermas), there is an increasing uncertainty among teachers in Sweden about with what right they are fostering other people's children. What does it mean to teach ‘common values’ to the coming generation? How do teachers find legitimacy and authority for this endeavour, not as family members or as politicians, but as teachers? To respond to this uncertainty, the paper takes the public/private distinction as a starting‐point for rethinking the place of the school. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and of Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, it argues that the school is an in‐between place—a place that transforms values into ‘common goods’ and turns fostering into a teaching matter. The overall purpose of the paper is to sketch out the consequences of this ‘in‐betweenness’ for what it means to find one's voice as a teacher in fostering the coming generation.

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