Affective encounters in higher education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we examine how thinking with affect theory offers fertility within higher education studies to see and do teaching and learning differently. For many educators in universities, the idea that teaching is a cognitive process of information transmission is still taken-for-granted. These beliefs are visible through the persistence of nomenclature such as ‘content’, predictable learning ‘outcomes’, and by the dominance of linear teaching aids (such as PowerPoint slides) across the sector internationally. An alternative conception of what teaching and learning is, and does, posits the classroom as a space of emergent relational connections in which learning is experienced as an affective force that constitutes being-in-the-world. To sketch shapes for understanding the affective encounters of teaching and learning, we think with the concept of inconvenience from the work of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant. We offer three illustrative examples of how teaching might be understood as an opportunity to surface, to welcome, and to problematise the inconvenience of others. Our argument is that an engagement with the affective in education can help us in understanding how power relations make themselves felt within the affective currents of educational encounters, as well as enabling educators to recraft their teaching in creative and meaningful ways. We conclude by contending that critical theories of affect can enhance educators’ work towards fostering social justice in the classroom, as well as in moving closer to an enriched understanding of the discomfort and challenge of what it means to teach and to learn.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• Lauren Berlant
• teaching
• learning
• relational pedagogies

Introduction

The turn to affect in the arts, humanities, and social sciences offers generative methodological and theoretical threads that can be interwoven with the field of higher education. Our argument is that affect theory offers new insights for educators in their theory-practice, and that such insights offer potential vibrancy to a field currently dominated by pedagogies that perpetuate limited ways of conceptualising the world. For example, universities prioritise pedagogic approaches that seek to mute or omit the role of invariance, emergence, and fluidity in the classroom, preferring generalisable ‘what works’ approaches (Biesta 2007; Kinchin and Gravett 2022). Teaching understood as the transmission of content is commonplace (Almarghani and Mijatovic 2017; Carless 2022; Kinchin et al. 2016), and institutions often advocate teaching techniques that give precedence to cognitive tips and standardised strategies for information delivery. Such strategies fail to acknowledge, and certainly do not harness, the presence of emotional, affective, and relational connections within the classroom. They do not acknowledge the affective and emotional impacts of others (both human and nonhuman) upon the learning encounter. Attuning to affect is about noticing the micro-practices, frictions, and resonances of the everyday. It is about attending to the minor currents and gestures of daily life (Manning 2016). It is a ‘politics of the ordinary’ (Berlant 2022, 50). Within the ordinary encounters of teaching and learning, affects circulate as resonances, sensations, or ‘shimmers’ (Berlant 2022; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Zembylas 2022). These are precognitive bodily experiences that flicker and flow within and beyond the classroom, both into and beyond bodies. Attending to affect is about thinking about how education feels, and about how learners and teachers feel each educational encounter in diverse, different, and powerful ways. As Nathan Snaza writes ‘whatever else learning is, it is irreducibly affective’ (Snaza 2020, 117).

In this paper, therefore, we do not define education as skills acquisition or the linear transmission of knowledge; learning is not understood purely as an object available to measurement (Taylor 2017). Rather, we are interested in shifting ‘the focus back to a notion of education centred on being and becoming’ (Taylor 2017, 421). In particular, affect theory offers a way to attune to the relational connections that pervade educational encounters (Gravett 2023), how these are experienced and felt viscerally by diverse bodies (Danvers 2018). Increasingly, today’s universities are recognising that closer attention must be paid to key issues such as equity, diversity, and social justice and how inequities are perpetuated or mitigated within educational institutions. Educational disparities remain entrenched in higher education (Bozalek et al. 2018; Richardson, Mittelmeier, and Rienties 2020), and the issue of how to increase pedagogies oriented to care and inclusivity in educational contexts marked by inequalities is an ongoing concern (Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2024). And yet, such ethical, political, and dynamic issues cannot meaningfully be understood in sterile ways, with generalisable, linear, and predetermined pedagogic approaches that overlook the nuances of everyday interactions. We suggest that theories of affect may provide new ways of conceptualizing the world that can help educators make sense of the messy complexity and fluidity of the learning environment, and of students’ diverse experiences. Indeed, the study of affect has been presented as crucial for understanding how we might notice the subtle operations of power, and how inequalities are shaped by everyday encounters (Juvonen and Kolehmainen 2018). In its surfacing of nuance, and of the ways in which ordinary experiences are felt, attuning to affect promotes a revaluing of who and what matters within teaching and learning. It encourages us to understand and to question the affective work that is required of learning, and it can also enable educators to teach ‘in the moment’, and to attend to the subtle and dynamic moments of classroom relations. Our article begins with tracing the histories and conceptions of affect theory and considering its contribution to contemporary scholarship. We then move to examine the concept of inconvenience (Berlant 2022) and its utility for understanding affective relations within educational encounters. We then turn to consider the possibility of developing an ‘affective craft’ within teaching (Airton 2020), where educators explicitly attend to inconvenience, and seek to harness the power of affect within their teaching. In doing so, we ask not only how can we understand what affect means, but, what can attuning to affect enable teachers to do?

What is affect theory?

Despite still sitting in the margins of educational research, interest in understanding the role of affect, and engaging ideas from affect theory/studies, is gaining momentum amongst higher education scholars. Although, there are numerous ‘different districts and genealogies of affect theory’ (Seigworth and Pedwell 2023a, 20), scholarship in this area has often evolved around key texts that heralded the ‘affective turn’ within the social sciences. This includes work by Clough (2007), Massumi (1995; 2015), Stewart (2007; 2011); Gregg and Seigworth (2010); Seigworth and Pedwell (2023b), Berlant (2011; 2022) and Ahmed (2004; 2010). These ‘districts’ of affect scholarship are also in turn often indebted to, and inspired by, the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze.

Today, affect studies continues to evolve and intertwines with work across the related fields of posthumanism, new materialist studies, sociomaterial studies, process philosophy, as well as with relational theories. It has become a ‘writhing poly-jumble of a creature’ (Seigworth and Pedwell 2023b, 4), and there are notable differences in how affect has been defined by different theorists (as explored in depth in Schaefer 2019). However, within this poly-jumble, it is noticeable that affect is not usually conceptualised as synonymous to emotion. We might instead define emotion as conscious processes or cultural constructs that can be articulated, understood, or codified (Zembylas 2021). While emotions and affect overlap, affect more specifically alludes to precognitive, sensory, experiences, and relations to surroundings (Zembylas 2021). Affect is more commonly understood as forces, sensations or ‘shimmers’, that are felt bodily (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). Importantly, affects cannot be controlled and are not predictable. Rather, they are always in motion, in flux; between people, things, and ideas (Ahmed 2010; Gannon et al. 2019; Gravett et al. 2023). They circulate and evolve within and beyond ‘ordinary’ encounters, in mobile ways. As Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth describe:

affect arises in the midst of inbetweenness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon … affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human and nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds. (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 1)

Of course, thinking about emotions is not new to teaching and learning, and tracing the contours of what learning is and how it is experienced has been underway for decades within educational theory. So, what new purchase on educators’ perennial problems might thinking with affect theories be able to offer? The past two decades have seen a marked change in how education scholars think about affect and emotion in relation to teaching and learning. No longer confined to a binary approach of thinking about emotion/reason, body/mind, contemporary scholars have begun to examine emotion and affect as fundamentally interwoven with pedagogy (Zembylas 2021). As a result, we might consider how affective relations in education ‘emerge as entanglements of material, embodied, and discursive elements within a particular educational setting’ (Zembylas 2021, 9). We might consider how affective relations shape every micro-moment of contact, every encounter.

This offers a significant shift in how we might think about individual teachers and learners, about classrooms, spaces, materials, and objects, who and what might matter within teaching and learning. Thinking about affect, and a sense of being-in-relation, troubles entrenched understandings of learning and the agency of individuals within societies. Cognitive knowledge and the role of the individual have long been valorised within education; affective modes of knowing and experiencing the world offer a different story. As Diane Mulcahy explains, ‘relationality comes to the fore challenging the understanding that a traditional knowing subject lies at the heart of learning and that this subject is separable from its relations with the world’ (Mulcahy 2018, 96). Feelings do not simply reside within bounded and autonomous individuals, and then move outward toward objects (Ahmed 2010). A focus on relational pedagogies (Gravett 2023) encourages us to attune to relations, objects, spaces, policies, materials and so much more.

Thinking about affect requires a recognition that learning and teaching is always situated, highly contextualised, and informed by the moment in which we find ourselves within, as well as with our relations to surroundings. This shift in thought enables us to consider ourselves as entangled and in relation to others (both human and non-human) (Gravett 2023), and to consider more closely and thoughtfully how learning and teaching feel. Thinking with affect might enable us to explore how institutions are permeated by, and also create, affective atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Stewart 2011). Thinking with affect forces us to pay attention to the nuances of co-presence, its frictions, discomforts, abrasions, and the work it requires of us to engage with others. As Zembylas explains ‘we might consider how teachers and students are moved, what inspires or pains them, how feelings and memories play into teaching and learning’ (2021, 1).

The inconvenience of education

We also find the ideas of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant particularly useful here. Berlant introduces the concept of inconvenience, exploring the inconvenience, and ambivalence, of affective relations with other people, and other nonhuman things and objects. Berlant explains how inconvenience is the

force that makes one shift a little while processing the world. It is evident in micro-incidents like a caught glance, a brush on the flesh, the tack of a sound or smell that hits you, an undertone, a semiconscious sense of bodies copresent. (Berlant 2022, 2)

For Berlant, ‘inconvenience focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects’ (Berlant 2022, 28). Learning and teaching encounters require affective work of us; it requires us to change, evolve, and adapt to others. This work is exposing, discomforting and requires us to be open to the ‘friction of being in relation’ (Berlant 2022, 2). In engaging with one another and being affected and receptive to one another, we are made aware of our own lack of agency, power, and autonomy, what Berlant describes as our lack of sovereignty. And yet, we rarely describe or think about teaching and learning in this way: as a friction, as a lack of control, as an entanglement. Paying critical attention to the affective currents of co-presence can help us to see teaching and learning, and the ways in which we interact with one another, differently. Occupying the same space as other people is affectively charged, and this ‘friction of co-presence’ can be provoking and discomforting. Such encounters involve a willingness to sit with the experience of uncertainty, unable to predict, not knowing as to what might occur, and how it might be felt. Such experiences may involve unlearning one’s preconceptions and assumptions and being open to being affected and adapted by another.

We might not want to show up to this work; sometimes we might not feel able to meet the charged atmospheres of everyday life (Stewart 2011, 445). Certainly, the impacts of social isolation brought on by the Covid pandemic have left many of us unwilling/unable to engage in the intensity of regular encounters with others, perhaps engendering a feeling of what Berlant describes as ‘overcloseness’ (2022, 2). Perhaps for some of us, online learning offers a mode of managing the affective encounters, of experiencing affect differently. However, Berlant also explores the desire each of us have for being driven towards inconvenience, its generative possibilities, and how such affective encounters with others enable access to ‘the complexities of staying attached to life and life’s good hard things’ (Berlant 2022, 170). Making connections to others are fundamental to meaningful teaching and learning (Gravett 2023) and yet such connections are not neutral, and may not be experienced as comfortable. Attuning to the inconvenience and tensions of affective relations involves both acknowledging and staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016). It also involves finding more affirmative ways to utilise the charge of connection and the inconvenience of others.

Finding affirmative ways to relate to one another is particularly important given that affect is also infused with power. Affective shimmers, forces, and frictions are not neutral or experienced uniformly. Crucially, thinking with affect also creates openings for examining the entanglements of power in higher education pedagogy and practice. Thinking about affect, and how learning feels for others, can be generative in thinking in nuanced ways about the inequities that pervade higher education and about fostering social justice in education. For example, Berlant explains:

The minima of inconvenience can go under the radar … at maximum intensity, though, the affective sense of inconvenience is harder, less easy to shake off or step around … the strong version of inconvenience to forced adaptation to something socially privileged or structurally pervasive. It registers the material effects of inequality’s persistent force. It connotes the push of feeling compelled to manage pressures that pervade the ordinary’s exercises and disciplines … or dealing with any of the many hierarchies of difference and distinction that are always jostling one around, demanding one’s energies, insisting on the maintenance of one or many supremacist status quos. (Berlant 2022, 4)

Here, Berlant describes the difference between the ‘ordinary’ shimmers of affect and the affective intensity of being forced to adapt to status quos and hierarchies of difference and distinction. A consideration of affect and its frictions may be vital if teachers are to develop an awareness of the ways in which educational encounters are permeated by hierarchies. For example, Mulcahy and Martinussen (2023) describe how educators might attune to affect in order to understand class relations, exploring how different students are able to engage in any given setting. Adopting a more noticing stance, that acknowledges the existence of different resonances, dynamics, and capacities in the classroom may help move towards a more affirmative approach. Indeed, recognition and appreciation of the existence of affective atmospheres and forces may be the first step towards pedagogic practices that are less ‘complicit’ in the continuation of injustices (Zembylas 2020). As Zembylas explains, ‘the affective turn … draws attention to the entanglement of affects and emotions with everyday life in new ways. More importantly, [it] creates important ethical, political, and pedagogical openings in educators’ efforts to make transformative interventions in educational spaces’ (2021, 1).

Affective craft

There may also be ways, then, in which teachers are able not just to notice inconvenience but to actively reshape affective relations, leading to potentially transformative interventions. This might mean that certain relations could be given space to flourish, and other hierarchies of difference and distinction might be, at least momentarily, constrained. Zembylas (2023) examines how certain affects and emotions are reproduced within higher education, for example, the affective atmospheres of anxiety and competition created by neoliberalism. And yet, affect may be able to disrupt these conditions. For example, ‘affective experiences and relations in higher education such as conviviality and solidarity may work as forms of resistance’ (Zembylas 2023, 3). Given that affective atmospheres, including competition, anxiety, inclusion, and exclusion, are created through pedagogies, policies, and practices, what teachers do in the classroom matters. For example, Snaza explores the potentialities for educational encounters: ‘to use Massumi’s (2015) apt term, educational situations prime actants for events. They make some events more or less likely; they inform tendencies for movement and action’ (Snaza 2020, 115–6). Likewise, Dernikos and colleagues explore how harnessing affect in teaching can be associated with the ability to capacitate and incapacitate bodies differently:

[Affect is the] coming together of ideas, differences, and intensities across students, teachers, and knowledge  …  It can slow down or speed up events or make moments more or less impactful; it can capacitate and incapacitate bodies differently. Affects sparked by a video clip, discussion, material, or sound, for example, may speed up or slow down classwork, thus contributing to different feelings of excitement or languor in classroom spaces and connections among participants. (Dernikos et al. 2020, 15)

Different pedagogical approaches contribute to different feelings in classroom spaces and to different connections among participants. In the following example, Kathleen Stewart describes the changing affective atmosphere of the classroom when she employs storytelling and questioning techniques that enable emergent dialogue:

Something subtle but powerful had shifted. The abstract high horse of classroom knowledge decorum had been contaminated with any number of things pinging around the room – possibilities, memories, preoccupations, eyes seeking contact, and bodies shifting in their seats. The room had become a scene we were in together as bodies and actors. (Stewart 2020, 31)

Lee Airton describes these kinds of affirmative, pedagogical approaches as a mode of affective craft (Airton 2020). For Airton, affective craft might be about employing questioning approaches and providing open spaces for students to lead and shape the learning encounter. In this way, affective craft disrupts hierarchies and ‘avoids pushing or leading in a particular direction. Rather, ask a simple yes/no question, sit back, and let students carry the conversation for as long as possible. Harness this energy’ (Airton 2020, 104). Similarly, Carol Taylor describes a more creative, experimental, and open kind of pedagogic practice, for example using Lego modelling, which she names ‘edu-craft’ (2018). Taylor describes ‘edu-crafting’ as ‘cheap, low tech, and everyday experiments of entangled doing, being and thinking’. Importantly, these experiments have the power to create openings for ‘relational flips’ (Taylor 2018, 373–4) that disrupt and redirect the ways in which individuals are able to come together and relate to one another.

Affective encounters in the classroom: three illustrative examples

We now offer three examples of affective encounters within teaching and learning in higher education. The first example tells the story of an experience during our teaching in an American university, where affective experiences were prompted by a visual stimulus, within an art gallery. This encounter happened during our work with a group of final-year medical students. The second and third examples bring to life two educational encounters that took place within a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, in a UK university. The PGCert is a programme designed for new teachers but also includes established teachers who are looking to develop their experiences and attain a formal teaching qualification. Activities include group tutorials, large group lectures, seminars, and workshops. The second example recounts a time when we engaged storying and the sharing of vulnerabilities as pedagogic approaches to experiment with reshaping affective atmospheres within the classroom. The third example describes how we taught a tutorial using Play-Doh modelling, in order to explore the power of creative, embodied, methods as a means to disrupt hierarchies, foster collaboration, and to create new affective experiences and relations.

These three encounters are drawn from our own observations, pedagogies, and practices, and are framed by our experiences as teachers in higher education. These encounters serve as a methodology of interruptive moments (McCoy 2012), that we found interfered with our own habitual ways of thinking, and that we hope offer interruptions for you too, the reader. Our examples offer openings. They are borne from our own experiments in surfacing the mess that is teaching, and the social world which is ‘vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct’, and which ‘changes like a kaleidoscope’ (Law 2004, 2). In sharing these examples from our practice, our aim is not to pretend objectivity, or to ‘convince with claims of validity’ (Massumi 2015, viii), but rather to ‘invite and to incite the reader with thought experiences … on a course of their own beyond its ken’ (Massumi 2015, viii). We now turn to the first example.

The art of affective practice

I was invited to observe a session with final-year medical students at an art gallery in Madison, Wisconsin. Present were myself [Simon], ten students, their tutor, and an art gallery guide who was leading the session. For many students of medicine, the programme that they study is established from an evidence base of collected facts, examined and responded to through a process of clinical reasoning. And yet, lying behind the hard science, debate rages over whether there is only science or art involved. There is a tendency to take comfort in the fact it is studied as a science, and yet practiced as an art.

In this encounter, the students were asked to look at various selected portraits in a gallery and explain what the figure was telling them through their representations. At first, the students were somewhat reticent. Responses were muted, hesitant, and uncertain. Slowly though, encouraged by the guide to express ideas about the emotions being transmitted, to find ways of explaining the expressions and the impacts of these, more was forthcoming. The students began to engage with their affective responses to the artwork, to find ways of describing these, explaining to their peers what they saw, how they translated each initial feeling, what this could mean, and how they may then explore this. The thoughts offered were not uniform. They emerged, were contested, were reformed, and new words and motions were established. Each student reacted in different ways, often accompanied by different facial expressions and hand gestures to help articulate what they saw represented by the artist although focused through the person they were now engaging with – the subject of the piece itself.

As the session progressed, the students became more animated, engaging in ways that recognised the situated nature of the encounter. The dialogue was challenging. The inconvenience of the activity appeared to echo the discomfort felt of the uncertain human and medical encounters that they had previously experienced and were preparing for in the future. The move from the science, the factual knowledge they had all gathered and the art of how to practice this with an inconvenient other, a patient. Here, the connection whilst imagined was central. What reaction was stimulated by the portrait, the focus of the eyes, the placing of the arms, the tilt of the head, the colour of the skin? And how did the student select words to bring meaning to how they were reacting to the cue presented or realised? Throughout the encounter the tutor observed, intently listening and sometimes nodding agreement but remained silent. Only afterwards did she reflect with the students that the intention was to enable the learners to experience the value of being in relation to another, to do so purely through reaction to this and how powerful this can be to experience the other in this way. She reflected upon how each student picked on different aspects, whether how the light suggested a different expression, how the eyes betrayed a different sense or feeling, how the colour of the skin suggested symptoms or where the person was in relation to particular objects. In this way, she raised the different shimmers and abrasions felt by each of those present within the session and how each felt and experienced difference represented by the figure they all saw, and yet saw differently. The students also responded, noting how intense the encounters were, taking in as well as giving out cues themselves. A process of constant evolving ideas, regenerating views, and interpretations was taking place as each student assembled their responses in connection with a visual but static representation.

My feedback’s bleeding: vulnerability and storytelling as affective craft

Reading this paper by Sam Shields (2015) ‘“My work is bleeding”’: exploring students’ emotional responses to first-year assignment feedback’, I [Karen] was reflecting upon the emotional and affective impacts of feedback processes, and how affect and emotion circulates through feedback and is materialised via text. I also wanted to explore how sharing vulnerabilities might work in the classroom as a pedagogic approach. An example of this occurred during a workshop on assessment and feedback approaches. My aim was to discuss with participants the emotional and affective impact of critical feedback upon the recipient, and to consider strategies that educators might employ to mitigate this impact, and that learners might employ to manage their own response. To help the discussion, I decided to share (anonymously) some examples of my own feedback I had received on my writing, via anonymous peer review, when I first began submitting articles for publication.

The comments I shared were the following:

Obviously, the paper is not based on a well-formulated research question.

It seemed to me as if they don’t really understand what they are doing as researchers – as if they are going through the motions

The most concerning issue is related to the literature review, as it seems incomplete, and incoherent.

Because I initially share these comments anonymously, what usually follows is a light-hearted debate about the harshness of the feedback and its likely impact upon the author. We usually laugh together about the tone of the comments, as well as their potential lack of use in offering a constructive pathway to improve. As an activity this works well, however, it is when I reveal that these are comments that I received on my own work that I find that the affective atmosphere in the room usually changes. Something shifts; something flips. At this point, the learners often engage even further with both me and the exercise, commiserating or laughing with me at the experience, and sharing their own experiences of receiving impactful feedback. The hierarchy of teacher/student feels disrupted. There is also a potency in the power of storytelling here. As I share my story, we are each able to ‘live’ the ideas in ways that are affectively felt. Students often feedback just how valuable they find this as an exercise. They report how realising that a person who they perceive to be an experienced academic also experiences critical and negative feedback is affecting. They particularly seem to benefit from my vulnerability in being willing to share my ‘imperfections’, and the care I am demonstrating in doing so. In engaging the affective forces of vulnerability, care, and also of surprise as the story unfolds, I am able to shape the ways in which students experience the class in a powerful way.

Playing together: affective encounters with Play-Doh

In a small seminar room, 20 staff, studying a PGCert in Higher Education, were introduced to the theme of learning design. When thinking about learning design in higher education, an overriding schema is often presented through notions of alignment, that often translates towards outcomes that are predictable through a linear, well-trodden pathway. To understand whether our colleagues conceptualised learning design in this way, we [Simon and Karen] asked them to work in interdisciplinary groups of four or five. In doing so we anticipated moments of inconvenience caused by working with others. This was made more acute when participants were asked to express how they viewed learning design by creating a shared model collaboratively using Play-Doh. The group was prompted to start with discussion and then model. Each group was given a range of colours to model with, and some sought additional ones from neighbours. After constructing the models, participants discussed their models, moving around the room in groups to get closer to each other’s tables and models. We also took photos to capture what the participants had created.

What became apparent, was that the participants found the opportunity to model, followed by discussion and debate, a valuable way to express not purely the outcome of learning design, but how it is impacted upon by values and the diversity of experience of teachers and learners present. Each participant was circulating in and out of the group, experiencing disruption and being disruptive. As each chose to interact or observe, the rhythm of the group changed and the models evolved. The moment at which each entered and withdrew from the discussion mattered to what then occurred and was created. How each participant felt and responded was disrupted by the movements, interventions, entrance and withdrawal of others.

The models that the four groups produced were all visually different. They did not represent linear structures. Instead, they represented the need to respect fluidity, in which teachers and learners brought ideas, reflected upon in the moment. Design therefore needed to recognise the shifting relational connections and that through this friction can be caused. This however can enable sparks that promote creativity, and the learning design should encourage the vibrations that enable this, rather than seek to smooth out difference. Design can be conceptualised to celebrate this and the different feelings, often unspoken and in the moment. In so doing, there is an opportunity to draw into the otherness of our experience. The participants recognised that it can be inconvenient as an educator to conceive of learning design that is not linear, but is rather a shifting kaleidoscope, impacted on by the space, the time, the uncertain and often inconvenient suggestions expressed. And yet, to allow the full palette to be available offers both wider involvement and a greater variety of experience to be celebrated. It also allows, in a world of greater fluidity (Bauman 1999), a more relevant response to learning in which content is not necessarily set, nor comprehensive and allows different paths to be chosen and explored.

The teaching approach we chose to adopt here using Play-Doh is one we were already familiar with using as a means to promote discussion and to enable students to lead the creation of an artefact (Stead et al. 2021). The method is material, embodied, and multisensory, surfacing the importance of learning in relation to our experiences of the world and the value of sensory inputs such as sight, hearing and touch (Stead et al. 2021). We do not suggest that this activity was experienced in the same way by each person. However, it was clear from the buzz, laughter and energy in the room, and participant feedback, that this approach disrupted the affective atmospheres in the space in a generative way. The task deliberately surfaces and foregrounds the inconvenience of engagement. It is awkward to be invited to play with a toy, to get up and move from one’s seat, and to play together with other adults. Initially, many participants experience uncertainty: what is the brief? What exactly is required? Should the representation be within some frame? But as participants begin to model and use the materials, to discuss with one another, and to move around the space, something shifts. The participants find a way to be present, temporarily dislocated from the hierarchies of daily life. As Stewart (2020, 31) describes, the ‘high horse of classroom knowledge decorum [becomes] contaminated with any number of things pinging around the room – possibilities, memories, preoccupations, eyes seeking contact, and bodies shifting’.

In introducing the Play-Doh approach, the teacher is able to redirect the relations within the classroom and make the learning encounter feel quite different had we lectured to the group or engaged in a different activity. As in the first and second examples, the session harnessed the affective power of surprise by using an unexpected approach. As in the first and second examples, the activities encouraged an atmosphere of collectivity, where participants were interpellated to consider themselves as entangled with others. Hierarchies were disrupted, between teacher/student, novice/expert, art/science. In harnessing affect in this way, the teacher can disrupt conventional expectations regarding pedagogy, hierarchy, and learning design, creating collective affects of collaboration, fun, and emergence. At the same time, the multisensory experience of learning creates new opportunities for learning to be forged and to be affectively and materially felt in multiple ways, as bodies, things, and spaces create new configurations.

Discussion and further research

In different ways, these three illustrative examples offer experiments with affective craft. We can see from the examples how we might understand affective craft as about employing questioning approaches, as about providing open spaces for students to lead and shape the learning encounter, or as about disrupting hierarchies, and avoiding ‘pushing or leading in a particular direction’ (Airton 2020, 104). In each of the three encounters described, the ways in which pedagogies were engaged created a shift in the affective atmospheres and relations of the group. Inconvenience was not removed. Rather it was surfaced, foregrounded, harnessed, presented as inevitable in our engagement with others and with the requirements of what it means to teach and to learn. Participants were however encouraged to use this inconvenience in more affirmative, inclusive, ways. Through collaborative work, and by reflecting on their connections with others (both human and nonhuman), the activities encouraged participants to see themselves, not as autonomous individuals, but, as situated and in relation with others.

We have sketched here the shapes of three examples, but there are many and potentially unlimited possibilities for other experimental examples of affective ‘edu-craft’. Our illustrative examples also focus on understanding affect within physical classrooms, and how affect circulates within and beyond online encounters warrants further research, as we begin to understand more about the alterity of what it means to connect online and in hybrid ways.

Conclusions

In this article, we have explored how capacities of affect and being affected unfold within higher education, and how educators might begin to attune to affect and its currents within the classroom. This enables us to both notice affective relations within education, as well as to consider how as teachers we might tweak ‘the interference and resonation patterns between individuals’ (Massumi 2015, 18), disrupting and reshaping normative relations. The ideas above therefore suggest ways in which educators might approach the classroom as a space where affect can be both acknowledged and harnessed, for the creation of creative and more inclusive pedagogies. In these instances, pedagogy is not understood as a vehicle for delivering information. Education is about more than the ‘conscious knowing’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1). Rather, teaching is about presence, connection, an ‘encounter’. Instead of connoting a model of teaching as knowledge transmission through words and language, affective teaching acknowledges the ways in which each of us ‘swell with affects beyond – or even before – words’ (Dernikos et al. 2020, 15). As Dernikos and colleagues explain: ‘scholars are now theorizing what these affective swells can do. And what is surprising is that this does not call for grand movements, nor for great reforms, but depends on the subversive power of the very small’ (Dernikos et al. 2020, 16).

These examples offer some small everyday ways in which we might experiment with pedagogic practices, in order to explore the affective uncertainty of teaching and learning, where each ebb and flow happen in the moments with learners and between them. We have explored how teaching and learning requires us to manage feelings of ambivalence, and the discomforting, inconvenient, aspects of co-presence. We suggest that attuning to affect has implications for both developing a richer understanding of power relations in education, as well as for seeking ways to foster more socially just pedagogies. Enhancing our pedagogy, practice, and research with affect theory, we argue, could be both exciting and transformative.

Disclosure statement

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