http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1027-2152
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the critical contribution that affects as bodily capacities to act, engage and connect can make to children’s learning in museums and schools. Drawing chiefly on empirical material collected over the course of visits by school children to Museums Victoria, Australia, and bringing a sociomaterial sensibility to bear, I trace the movements of these children through exhibition spaces and show pedagogic affect at work. I argue that children’s learning can usefully be understood in ways that go beyond social constructivism which underwrites museum learning and school education yet tends to neglect the role of affectivity and material agency in learning, as well as relations of power. As the empirical material shows, the politics of affective practice involve the co-constitution of bodies, spaces and objects in ways that actively intervene in established relations of power. I conclude by calling for a renewed engagement with the affective in education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Dianne Mulcahy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1027-2152
Notes
1. Learning can be defined minimally as ‘growth in knowledge’ (Sorensen, Citation2009).
2. In How to talk about the body? (Latour, Citation2004), the world does the affecting, rather than bodies. In earlier work, Latour & Stark (Citation1999) conceptualises the ‘affects’ of subjects via the notion of attachment: how one is affected by good and poor attachments. However, the bodily capacity to affect is not a focus. Actor-network theory has every potential for treating with affect and aspects of affect are evident in much of Latour’s work, for example, Aramis, or, the love of technology (Latour, Citation1996).
3. Writing within the history of science and anthropological studies of science and technology, Asdal (Citation2003, p. 61) states that ‘the term “post-constructivism” is primarily useful for preventing the concept of constructivism from being confused with social constructivism (the assumption that everything can be reduced to “the social”), but also for avoiding a fruitless discussion of realism versus social constructivism’ (p. 61). The term post-constructivism implies that constructivism and post-constructivism run in parallel; post-constructivism is not something which comes ‘after’ constructivism but rather something which both challenges and includes it.
4. In classic ANT, the concept of translation concerns negotiation. It is always insecure, a process that may lead to no equivalence (e.g. between cognitive knowledge and the knowledge that arises from the translation process).
5. Pickering (Citation2017, p. 382) explains that the centrality of ‘agency’ and the extension of this concept to nonhuman agents aligns his approach with what is often called the new materialism or new vitalism. He further explains that the formulation ‘affecting/affected by’ is taken from DeLanda’s (Citation2011) Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason which draws in turn on Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1987).
6. In line with an assemblage analytic, data are a matter of encounter. They enter into a relation with theory and researchers (or not). As MacLure (Citation2013, p. 229) speculates, ‘perhaps we could think of engagements with data, then, as experiments with order and disorder, in which provisional and partial taxonomies are formed, but are always subject to metamorphosis, as new connections spark among words, bodies, objects, and ideas’ (p. 229).
9. In April 2017, the Australian Federal Government announced changes to citizenship laws requiring applicants to live in Australia for four years and demonstrate ‘competence’ in English and commitment to Australia. The citizenship bill was defeated when it came before parliament. In the light of this defeat, applications for citizenship have escalated evidencing the uncertainty that now attends policy around citizenship in Australia.
11. These questions and answers are taken from the practice test questions document at https://www.border.gov.au/Citizenship/Documents/practice-questions.pdf with the items in brackets constituting the ‘correct’ answers to the questions posed.
12. A key constructivist learning theorist in education, Lev Vygotsky, also credits the intricate relationship between the cognitive and the affective. However, and as Roth (Citation2017) reports, Vygotsky began theorising affect and intellect as inseparable phenomena during the final years of his life − work that remained incomplete.