Art, affect, and the production of pedagogy in newcomer language classrooms

Abstract

This article describes research exploring the potential of arts-based, affective pedagogy to enact the dual mandate of second language programs for adult newcomers to Canada: facilitating official language learning and social integration. Deleuze-Guattarian affect theory informs the study framing both research and pedagogical practices as effects of sociomaterial relations between bodies, human and non-human. Focusing on the concept of affect foregrounds the power of classroom objects to intervene in pedagogical events. Similarly, affect reorients the onto-epistemological underpinnings of research; it becomes an assemblage from which problems arise. This particular research assemblage, including classroom video-recorded data of an arts-based lesson and associated teacher interviews, resulted in the question How do classroom materials contribute to the production of pedagogy in newcomer language classrooms? Adult learners in two classes – one French and one English Second Language – read Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, a wordless narrative about migration. After reading, they created imaginary character profiles. The data suggest how the relational forces at work within classroom assemblages constituted by human bodies (teachers, students, researchers) and non-human bodies (curriculum, texts, digital devices, etc.) transform planned pedagogy into something unpredictable, but also creative and vibrant. The article concludes with some implications of arts-based, affective pedagogy for newcomer language education.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2020.1846554.

Keywords:

• Second language education
• arts-based pedagogy
• affect
• assemblage
• newcomers
• sociomaterial

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 From a strictly etymological viewpoint, pedagogy can be contrasted with andragogy. The former term relates to children specifically and the latter to adults. However, my usage of the term pedagogy does not make this distinction and instead refers more generally to an approach to teaching and learning regardless of the age of the learners involved.

2 Data associated with the FSL classroom were collected in French. The author has provided the English translations.

3 Author Shaun Tan (2010) explained his creative process saying: “The endpapers of The Arrival feature a series of passport-sized portraits, many of them inspired by photographs from archives of the Ellis Island Museum in New York City … Some photographs are ‘quoted’ fairly directly” (Tan, 2010, 12). However he makes no reference to the Russian literary figure the student identified.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (2017-NP-197745).