Body matters: The critical contribution of affect in school classrooms and beyond

Abstract

How do passions, emotions and desires play out pedagogically in classrooms and other learning settings? In this chapter, I investigate the workings of affectivity within school classrooms and teaching more broadly by exploring intensities, sensations or energies that can be discharged not only through human bodies, but also objects and spaces. Deploying data fragments drawn from video case-studies conducted as part of a national study of professional teaching standards and teacher professional learning in which teachers (in this case, school geography teachers) and their students took part, I trace affective relations and embodiment in action utilising an analytic of assemblage. I draw on concepts from actor-network theory and poststructuralist theory that invokes the work of Deleuze to make an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching and learning and the value of investigating affectivity in a way that breaks with subject-centredness and the privilege granted to the human/individual. Exploring teaching and learning as practised affords a strong sense of the embodied and affective terrain of teaching as a profession and invites attention to the role that affectivity, as an ‘unruly practice’, can play in challenging institutional norms in classrooms, as well as our currently established systemic concerns in education with metrics, measures and outcomes. Affect ‘escapes’ or operates below the threshold of these concerns and provides transgressive possibilities. Taking the ‘affective turn’ in education challenges us to better recognise the interweaving of cognition, emotion and action in learning settings, while forging new directions for curriculum and pedagogies wherein the roles of bodies and other material processes and their affective potential are acknowledged and embraced.