Affects of Teaching

• In Event: The Affective Turn, Sexuality, and Curriculum Studies

Abstract

This presentation offers a theorized reading of teachers’ affects. Although recent educational research acknowledges the “affective turn” in social theory, there have been few efforts to review and theorize the affective dimensions of teaching. Drawing on cultural studies and social theory, I examine teachers’ affects across a number of texts using the concepts of objects of desire and assemblages. This methodology involves looking at multiple popular and scholarly texts by and about teachers in order to map affective dynamics in teaching as forms of connections.
First, I look at objects of desire, those objects to which teachers (as an occupation, a discourse, a subject or level specialist) are attached and the implicit promises that such objects (e.g. the innocent child, love of reading, critical thinking) make. Lauren Berlant explains: “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us…. Proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises” (2006, p. 20). I examine the objects of desire that circulate in texts on teaching and the cluster of promises those objects seem to guarantee.
Second, I diagram affective movements of teaching via Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage: the multiple processes of arranging, organizing, and fitting together an individual, a group, or an organization. An assemblage “throws itself together out of forms, flows, powers, pleasures, encounters, distractions, drudgery, denials, practical solutions, shape-shifting forms of violence, daydreams, and opportunities lost or found. Or it falters, fails” (Stewart, 2007, p. 29). If teaching is “thrown togetherness,” the energizing affects are vital to understand the relays, jumps, slides, and connections. If we consider teaching as assemblages, affects are central energizing forces albeit with transitory and uncertain effects.
In tracing the objects of desire and assemblages of teaching, I read a wide range of texts including: classic and recent texts on teachers, such as Lortie (1975) and Taubman (2009); teacher movies, including, To sir, with love (1967) and The history boys (2006); high profile news stories on teachers, for instance, Mary Kay Letourneau’s saga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kay_Letourneau, n.d.); policy documents on teaching, especially Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden (2005) and Wilson (2009); and recent publications on teachers’ emotions, including Schutz & Zembylas (2009). In each of these texts, I attend to the affective processes, forces, and expressions of change and gauge their creative, authoritarian, and/or enabling effects.

References
Berlant, L. (2006). Cruel optimism. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17(3), 20-36.
Darling-Hammond, L. & Baratz-Snowden, J. (Eds.). (2005). A good teacher in every classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schutz, P. A. & Zembylas, M. (Eds.). (2009). Advances in teacher emotion research. New York: Springer.
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham: Duke.
Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers. New York: Routledge.
Wilson, S. (Ed.). (2009). Teacher quality: Education policy white paper. Washington, DC: National Academy of Education.

Author

• Nancy L. Lesko, Columbia University, Teachers College