Teaching and Affect

• In Event: Curriculum Studies and Historicizing the Present: The Political and the Impracticality of Practical Knowledge

Abstract

Although a teacher’s capacity to “affect students” is central to teaching satisfactions and effectiveness, affect has typically been reduced to isolated teacher behaviors or generalized charisma. Drawing on recent scholarship on affect in the humanities, this presentation considers affect as central to the visceral force, vitality, and effects of teaching.
Theoretical Framework and Materials
Affect scholars acknowledge connections to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) concept of the assemblage. 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” (Stewart, 2007, p. 29). Assemblage directs us to mute the rational and representational ideas of teaching and to pay attention to the spaces and times in which physicalities exceed the rationalized system or the abstract understanding. To approach teaching as an assemblage, then, is to attend to the entanglements of language and matter, words and things, such as the bodily, disrupting, asignifying intensities of affect.
I will re-view a wide range of texts including classic scholarly texts on teachers and teaching, such as, Lortie (1975), Waller (1932), and Krathwohl et al. (1964), along with texts for general audiences and teacher movies. Most of the materials will stem from the period 1950-1975, when belief in the perfectability of teaching was strong.
Interpretations
The interpretive methods of affect studies vary widely, and this presentation draws specifically from Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant. Ahmed (2010) adopts an ethnographic orientation to affect; in studying happiness, she wrote, “I follow the word happiness around. I notice what it is up to, where it goes, who or what it gets associated with” (p. 14). Using this approach, I examine how studies of teaching and teachers forefront particular emotions of teaching, such as joy, shame, or anger. My interpretation will discern the work that particular affects—anxiety, frustration, or compassion--do in accounts of teaching.
I will also look at objects of desire, those objects to which teachers are attached (e.g. the innocent child, love of reading, critical thinking) and the implicit promises that such objects make. 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). For example, Lortie (1975) writes that teachers long for “the good day,” when they are uninterrupted and when students and teachers are in sync; I will explore what such “good days” promise.
Significance
This presentation considers the intellectual history of affects in studies of teachers and teaching in order to challenge what gets erased, reduced, and misread. What kind of world of teachers and teaching takes shape when a particular affect, such as, anger or frustration, provides a horizon?

Author

• Nancy L. Lesko, Teachers College, Columbia University