Exploring Visceral Literacies: Positioning, Vulnerability, and the Affective Dimensions of Teaching and Learning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Preparing and Supporting Beginning Teachers: The Role of Context and Culture in Teacher Preparation

Abstract

In drawing on various critical theories, this paper argues that emotions and affects are social, historical and collective and can be important tools, theoretically and methodologically, in reframing and disrupting many of the binaries and inequitable divisions of power, knowledge and bodies in schools. It explores these visceral literacies through the implementation of a semester-long project called the “Affective Archive” within a practicum-linked writing methods teacher education course. This project was designed to support teacher candidates in challenging the often narrow literacy practices currently enacted in classrooms and bringing recognition to bodies and stories commonly marginalized within more traditional forms of valued knowledge structures within school institutions.

Author

• Ashley Cartun, University of Colorado - Boulder