When "You Don't Want to Read It Again"? Exploring First Graders' Responses to "Willful" Texts

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Possibilities and Limits of Posthumanist Inquiry for Reimagining Literacy Education as the Practice of Justice

Abstract

Taking up the recent ‘turn’ toward affect and materiality (Clough, 2007), this paper highlights how becoming a “good” literate subject, in part, depends on how well a child intra-acts (Barad, 2007) with the vibrant (im)materialities enveloping classroom spaces. Thinking with observational and interview data from a 6-month ethnographic study, I “plug” in (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to theories of affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), trauma (Caruth, 1995) and will (Ahmed, 2014) to explore how literacy learning within a NYC first grade classroom functioned as an assemblage of transcorporeal encounters. Emphasizing the inseparability of human and non-human bodies (Alaimo, 2008), I contend that there is neither a fixed boundary nor firm distinction between the individual student and the classroom environment, which can quite literally get into and under one’s skin, thereby enhancing or diminishing a student’s capacities or energies (Brennan, 2002). I do so in order to reimagine classroom texts as unpredictable willful objects that transmit “sticky” intensities (e.g. of race, gender). Building upon the work of other critical scholars (e.g. Dutro, 2013; Erikson, 2005), I argue that such intensities permeate classroom spaces and affectively position students in ways that inflict trauma, or an insidious, daily injury that fosters a narrow view of race, gender, and/or sexuality.
These injuries, in effect, threatened first graders’ capacities to connect to their social worlds and to particular literacy texts/practices. This threat posed specific harm to boys of color, who were often positioned as “struggling,” “lazy,” or “willful.” Foregrounding the material realities of these more-than-human encounters, I invite educators to consider how a kind of healing can occur through a pedagogy of exposure, which seeks to not only expose but also recover traumatic wounds by reimagining an affective, albeit risky, relationship to past and present histories of violence. I conclude by proposing that such pedagogy, while post-humanist, does not imply a turning away from human beings, ethical accountability, or the political insights of other critical perspectives (such as queer theory and critical race theory), but rather signals a re/turning to, building upon, and complicating of existing theoretical accomplishments and analyses.

Author

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University