Affective assemblages: body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms

Abstract

Set within the affective turn in cultural and social theory, in this paper, I explore the significance of materiality and matter, most specifically, bodily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. The received view in education is that affect is tantamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily affectivity, technologies and texts, are used by teachers and learners to support and advance teaching and learning. Telling a sociomaterial story, I account for how materials participate in pedagogic practice and for what is performed through this participation (e.g. corporeal capacity, changed power relations regarding the subjectivities of teacher and learner and teaching and learning). Drawing on video case data collected as part of a national study, and utilising an analytic of assemblage, I trace affective relations in action towards making an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching-learning events in school classrooms and beyond. Registering bodily as intensity, affect effects change in pedagogical relationships, impelling acknowledgement of its substantive nature and its political import. Altogether, bodily matter matters. Implications of this mattering for education policy and practice are drawn out.

Keywords:

• affect
• pedagogic practice
• embodiment
• materiality
• actor-network theory

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference in Melbourne in 2010. I would like to thank the students, teachers and project partners, the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association, the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the Victorian Institute of Teaching, along with the Australian Research Council, who made this research possible.

Notes

1. Spanning 2007–2010, this Linkage Project was conducted in association with the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association with affiliates in five major Australian states, including Partner Investigator status for the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the teacher registration authority in Victoria (Victorian Institute of Teaching).

2. ‘The concept of the assemblage forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari (1988) denotes the ‘amalgam of places, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work that together constitute … knowledge/practices’ (Watson and Huntington 2008, 272, citing Wright 2005, 908). As Law (2009a, 146) comments, there is little difference between the term agencement − translated as ‘assemblage’ in English − and the term actor-network (heterogeneous network). Thus, I use these terms, or better perhaps, analytical metaphors, interchangeably. This usage is common in contemporary actor-network theory accounts.

3. As Massumi (1995, 88) has it, ‘there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification’. Contemporary academic discourses of affect ‘sit’ under the broad umbrella of poststructuralism. The primacy of language in post-structuralist theory has however been questioned with emphasis now placed on ‘non-representational theory’ (Thrift 2008).

4. In Massumi’s (1995, 91) account of affect as intensity, ‘intensity is asocial, but not presocial – it includes social elements’ (original emphasis).

5. As developed by the human geographer and social scientist, Nigel Thrift, non-representational theory, or the theory of practices, takes as its leitmotif movement and, like actor-network theory, emphasises practices understood as material bodies of work. Thrift acknowledges the many affinities of non-representational theory with actor-network theory in Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (2008, 110).

6. For each of 11 classrooms in eight schools and three major Australian states, two lessons, each lasting around 50 minutes, were videotaped using three cameras. One camera focused on the teacher, a second on individual students as part of a working group, and a third on the whole class as seen from the front of the room. Using as catalyst the video record from the whole-class camera, with the teacher camera image inserted as a picture-in-picture image in one corner of the display, teachers were invited to make a reconstructive account of the lesson events deemed critical to student learning. Similarly, students were invited to make an account of lesson events, using as stimulus the video record from the teacher camera, with the individual students’ camera image inserted as a picture-in-picture image in one corner of the display.

7. The case described here was the first of the 11 case studies conducted. Sandra’s lessons were filmed just after the football grand final, in 2007.

8. In examining some of the assumptions and the cultural context of a particular form of pre-school/infant school pedagogy, Bernstein (1975) drew a strong contrast between visible and invisible pedagogy. In visible pedagogy, the control of the teacher over the child is explicit; for example, the teacher transmits knowledge, controls the structure in which students communicate and makes expectations clear. In invisible pedagogy, while the teacher structures the classroom, children are afforded opportunities to learn through self-organised activity. Instructional practice is less overt. The social significance of these pedagogic modalities is argued to differ according to the social class of the child. More recently, it is claimed that what works educationally ‘is a mixed pedagogy, especially for working-class students’ (Hoadley and Muller 2009, 73).