Affective enactments: the pedagogy and cultural politics of reading in an Australian classroom

ABSTRACT

This paper concerns the pedagogical work affect does in an Australian Year 11 literature classroom. Thinking with Ahmed’s framing of affect from the viewpoint of cultural politics, I consider how affect aligns some bodies within particular social groups and situates some outside. Three key moments of affective charge are drawn from observations: students’ written responses, group discussions, and interviews. Analysing these moments from the perspective of Ahmed’s affective economy foregrounds the value of detecting students’ orientations towards or away from the classroom space, discourses, and practices. It indicates the potential for constructing the classroom as an inclusive and relational space allowing room for the different knowledges implicit in students’ experiences. It shows that students often find themselves interpellated by conflicting discourses that emphasise how they read themselves and their texts. Allowing opportunities to name, share, and process these conflicts can expand the efficacy of reading practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective economy
• norms
• orientation
• pedagogy
• reading
• stickiness

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In a classroom, literature and literacy are inextricably intertwined. It could be said literacy is in service of literature. When I teach close reading, literacy serves textual analysis and understanding in sophisticated ways. For example, teaching the literary device of counterfocalisation builds students’ literacy knowledge to better interpret texts. Perceptive interpretation of text involves cultural analysis and acknowledgement of the social basis of textual practices (Macken-Horarik, 2014). When students sit for their literature examination, they are not asked about literacy but will demonstrate their literacy skills in service of the literature studied. But this literature is also in service of literacies (including out-of-school literacies) that are applicable to students’ complex, globalised world and critical affective pedagogies are informed by both literary and literacy concerns. I use ‘literary’ and ‘literacy’, sometimes interchangeably, to indicate their deep interdependency and co-implication with each other within my teaching.

2 Ethics ID: 1543662 (anon) University Humanities and Applied Sciences Human Ethics Sub-Committee. Plain language requests for participation were sent home to both parents and students.

3 Following Tomkins (1991), Probyn (2005) uses ‘affect’ foregrounding the biological, how the biological and the social charge each other and ‘what it means to embody the social’ (p. 27). With regard to moment 1 when Anjali‘s laugh bodily expresses her shame as an outsider, this might mean she feels shame both physiologically and in her social relations as changing attitudes to immigrants in Australia become inscribed on her body. This shame is potentially productive as lines of connection build between Anjali and the text. While Ahmed emphasises the political and Probyn foregrounds the bodily and experiential, both explore the relationship between the bodily and the social.

4 This type of Othering often occurs in practices of multicultural education in schools. Although the nation is taken to be one big melting pot, in the rhetoric and reality of multiculturalism, differences of race, ethnicity, and language are essentialised.