(Re)Imaging Science Practices as Bodily and Affective Intra-Actions

• In Event: Innovations and New Directions in Methods and Frameworks for Learning

Abstract

New and emerging technological objects such as computers, laptops, smart boards, and various
educational interactive tools are changing the traditional classroom set up, organization, and the
kind of practices that can take place in science classrooms. These material entities notonly impact
classroom instruction, but also have an effect on students’ and teachers’ ‘bodily performances’.
When speaking of teaching and learning, educators rarely talk about bodies and affect. Feminist
scholar Clough (2009) who uses a genealogical approach to study of affect from Deleuze and
Guattari, Spinoza and Bergson, argues that “potential bodily [and] often autonomic
responses...affect exceeds consciousness: it refers to pre-subjective agency, a force that delimits
bodily boundaries, determining ‘bodily capacities to affect and be affected’” (p. 20). Feminist
scholars engaged in new materialisms posit that awareness of bodily and affective intra-actions
in education affords us, educators, to consider teaching and learning as force and/or intensive
encounter among the bodies, including, not only human bodies, but all living and non-living
physical materiality (Author, 2015; Blackman, 2012). In this study, we use a bricolage of
poststructural theory and feminist readings of new materialism, to explicate in what ways
teachers, students, and their subjectivities, desires, and bodies are inscribed in performativities of
science practices taking place under the current public school accountability and achievement
contexts. Based on data from my year-long ethnographic work in two middle grades science
classrooms located in the Southern United States, we draw on diffractive methods of analysis
(Barad, 2007), to explicate how science teachers’ subjectivities, and a group of English language
learner students bodies, are constructed, in an endeavor to provide an alternative understanding
for how material entities, embodiment, and subjectivity play out in science teaching and learning.
Our findings show, that through instructional and pedagogical decisions about material entities
(e.g. usage of interactive computer science labs, YouTube videos, tablets for assessments and
etc. ), modes of engagement, language processes, and physical objects to include and exclude in
the construction of science classroom events, science teachers played an important role in
providing different affordances for students’ bodily and affective engagement and selfidentifications
with science practices. Making body and affect visible in my data allowed me to
re-think the normative discourses and assessments in science education that separate the body
from the mind. Considering how different material entities produced different kinds of bodily
performances and subjectivities for students have important implications in understanding
inclusive science practices not only as lodged in students’ “abilities”, but also made possible
through different physical entities and affective forces. Considering science classrooms as spaces
where bodily encounters of students with material entities hold an affective, emergent quality on
students’ bodies, identities, their language, and science learning, is an important step toward
conceptualizing science practices as bodily and affective intra-actions.

Authors

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Chunjing Ji, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth