‘They can show you with their body’: affect, embodiment and access to learning

ABSTRACT

Academic underachievement of students from disadvantaged backgrounds is an ongoing and unresolved problem. Schools serving vulnerable communities often fail to meaningfully engage their students who are often exposed to significant family and environmental adversities. However, where the educational landscape is overwhelmed with neoliberal processes of accountability and testing, education generally comes to be understood as a cognitive process with little attention to the bodily or affective dimensions of learning. This paper draws on new theoretical ideas in affect and embodiment to build a case for an embodied, affective and creative pedagogy for students who live with poverty and adversity. Specifically, I report on research that investigates how two teachers utilised Creative and Body-based (CBL) provocations to redesign curriculum for disadvantaged students in their sites. In utilising the analysis of two narrative portraits, I highlight examples of bodily affectivity as well as affective pedagogical practices that impact on students’ capacity to learn and teachers’ capacity to teach. Analysis suggests that embodied and creative approaches enable new forms of communication and learner identities through bodies, senses and imaginings. Such approaches provide much needed affective conditions that ‘hook’ students in, encourage dialogue and help them to realise their potential as learners. Outcomes of this work signal an epistemological and pedagogical shift toward understanding bodies and creativity as agents of learning and knowledge production. By engaging with notions of a ‘learning body’ potential exists to challenge neoliberal practices in complex classrooms and support young people to foster stronger connections, hope and a re-inspired aspiration to learn.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• embodiment
• arts-based learning
• inclusion
• poverty

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank the inspiring teachers who shared their time, classrooms and ideas in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department for Education and Child Development, South Australia.