Affective Teaching for Effective Learning: A Deleuzian pedagogy for the (corporate era and) Chinese context

Abstract

In this article I explore the pedagogical value of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical concepts for helping make an ‘event’ of thought, with a view towards fostering deep learning in Chinese students' learning theory and criticism in a second language. Paying attention to the qualitative role of bodies, humour and creativity alongside an expanded trans-personal concept of ‘educational life forms’ that stretches out to include an affective assemblage of inhuman elements (such as art and technology), I explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical models provide a ethical alternative to corporate, Confucian and Cartesian models otherwise inhibiting students and teachers in the modern Sino-international university context.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• Guattari
• Chinese students
• affective teaching
• second language learning
• body
• intersubjective

Notes

1. Take the lecture theatre, for instance, and its being arranged and arrayed in such a way as to promote a certain hierarchical one-way relationship through its spatial organization. Here, an ‘exceptional individual’ is designed to stand at the front while everyone else sits in a subject(ed) position geared towards listening in silence and granting the lecturer their full attention.

2. Because of my own disciplinary background and influences I predominantly favour the use of audiovisual media as an affective force in my own teaching environments, and this is duly reflected in my rather limited focus upon other affective media on this outing. This lack of consideration is in no way intended to suggest that cinema is the best affective mode or medium available to a teacher, and I would encourage harnessing the disruptive sensory potentials of many other ‘image’ forms (such as soundimages or hapticimages). Indeed, I would argue that approaches that affectively target other sensory organs may even contribute to creating unplanned and untapped patterns of learning by stimulating different ways of interacting with the world and knowledge.