Mobilizing Emotion and Navigating Local Cultural Flows in a Media-Making Classroom

• In Event: Play, Drama, and Media Making as Cultural Flows: Research Innovation in Children and Youth’s Literacies

Abstract

This paper discusses emotion as integrally tied both to the analytical thinking associated with literacy learning, and to the transformative potential of literacy practices as they live in the local culture that flows in/through an urban English classroom. Drawn from an ethnographic case study of a high school English classroom that focused on media analysis and production, this paper shows how emotion circulates in the classroom in ways that combat disempowering discourses and distribute agency. In particular, I highlight one student, Veronica, a White Earth Ojibwe student, showing how she mobilized emotion in ways that transformed her understanding of the power of literacy to (re)present embodied knowledge and cultural resources. Pennycook (2010) argued that representational and embodied practices are always relocalized. Social practices in local spheres are always navigated across different scales (e.g., local, institutional, and global scales) that converge in cultural flows and are reaccented in the classroom. In this case, the intensity of Veronica’s feelings related to the pain of racism and to the healing effects of participating in pow-wow permeated the decisions she made and the positions she took up related to speaking, writing, and digital media creation. Often, these literacy practices were characterized by a tug and pull – a desire for deep communication and, at the same time, for silence in the face of what she perceived to be a vast chasm between her experience and that of her primarily African American and Latino/a classmates.
The construct of emotion employed in this study is drawn from interdisciplinary scholarship in social semiotics, anthropology, rhetoric, and educational philosophy. Of the many Western binaries associated with the word, emotion has been understood as an expression of affect, or natural bodily sensation, that is separate from the mind, hence irrational and in need of discipline. By contrast, Ahmed (2004), Micciche (2004), Boler (1999) Zembylas (2007), view emotion as action and strategy, constituted in ideologies and histories of participation. Data sources included fieldnotes, audio and video of class activities, artifacts, and interviews. Using social semiotics to reframe concepts about emotion, we applied the theory and method of mediated discourse analysis (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 2001) and geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003). This work regards meaning-making as both semiotically discursive and material. It foregrounds action in social spaces and provides a lens through which to understand the meaning of signs in practice.
This paper highlights three key events in which Veronica was highly emotive and show how emotion was both shaped by and shaping of the mediational means (talk, writing, podcast memoir) and cultural flows. That is, the way social actors mobilized emotion changed the text as a site of meaning making. Thus, emotion played a central role in students’ critical engagement with texts and ideas, one deeply related to how students as social actors transform signs in ways that may otherwise remain veiled in classrooms.

Author

• Cynthia J. Lewis, University of Minnesota