Charlene's Puppies: Embarrassing Obsessions? Or Happy Objects Deeply Connected to Living Literacies?

• In Event: The Affective Turn in Literacy Research: Theories, Potentials, Difference

Abstract

This paper takes up the intensity of childhood obsessions, how those interests come to be construed as intrusions to learning when they enter school contexts, and the way an examination of affect disrupts this narrative by bringing into view the possibilities for literacy and learning that spring from such relationships. Using Sarah Ahmed’s (2010) concept of happy objects, which theorizes happiness “as a promise that directs us toward certain objects, which then circulate as social goods … that accumulate positive affective value as they are passed around” (p.29), I look at the way one child, nine-year-old Charlene, transported her passionate attachment to animals to her fourth grade classroom by insinuating puppy videos into the classroom literacy learning assemblage.

Charlene was one of thirteen focal children in a four-month long month-long case study of a struggling classroom multiliteracies project. I explore the affective responses of Charlene, her teachers and her classmates in the larger context of the unfolding of the design-based project, in which the three teachers of the class of fifty-two fourth grade students came to recognize the limitations of literacy learning by design and the possibilities that opened up when affect came to be considered an important learning space (Author). Labeled with, and medicated for, severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Carlene’s teachers held low expectations for what she would accomplish in the classroom and thus accepted her off-topic puppy-focused writings as the best that could be hoped for from a child with such challenges. While at times encouraging of Charlene’s clandestine viewing of puppy videos during class time, her group mates were also embarrassed at the incursion of puppies into their group projects and viewed Charlene’s textual contributions to their group work on the oil industry in the province of Alberta as trivial.

By examining the way in which puppy videos as happy objects entered to challenge the group’s literacy project, I explore the way in which Charlene’s resistance to the status-quo in the group’s learning assemblage quietly demonstrated what was lost when her passionate attachments were ignored or simply tolerated. I then ask what might have been gained had the trajectory Charlene pursued through her happy objects been recognized as a way into critical engagement with issues of environmental stewardship and human responsibility.

Author

• Kimberly Lenters, University of Calgary