Compassionate anger as a mobilizer for social justice: feelings application in curriculum design

While learning a broad sense of compassion (feeling/being kind), students are seldom given a sustained opportunity to learn why they feel angry at the suffering of the other and what to do with that anger. Prosocial anger that adheres to compassion is not deemed as official affective knowledge in schools. While defining compassion as a virtue, this paper conceptualizes compassionate anger as a mobilizer for social justice. Becoming empathetic towards the suffering of the other is, and should be, one of the core educational goals in the era of a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. To this end, by examining the interaction between compassion as an ontological virtue and anger as an emotion, which is a somewhat paradoxical relationship, this paper theoretically juxtaposes compassion with four prosocial angers (impersonal, defensive, Aristotelean, and political) to construct four curriculum approaches to social justice (conservative, experiential, rational, and emancipatory).