"[Me and Cinderella] It's Kind of Shaky": Affective Trauma and "Willful Literacies" Within Readers Workshop

• In Event: 45.072 - Trauma and Affect in Digital and Nondigital Contexts: Findings From Four Classroom-Based Studies

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. “Plugging in[to]” or “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) theories of affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), trauma (Caruth, 1995) and will (Ahmed, 2014), I explore how literacy learning within a NYC first grade classroom functioned as an assemblage of transcorporeal (Alaimo, 2008) encounters in non-digital contexts. Emphasizing the inseparability of human and non-human bodies, 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 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 a daily, insidious 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 students of color: boys whose testimonies were often misread as moments of “struggle,” “laziness,” or “willfulness,” and girls whose internalization of Eurocentric beauty standards elicited intense feelings of shame. I conclude by inviting 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.

While sociocultural theories have brought much needed attention to the ways in which whiteness impinges upon official literacy curricula to symbolically wound children of color, whose experiences, languages, and literacies continue to remain devalued (e.g., Kirkland & Jackson, 2009; Souto-Manning, 2012; Tyson, 1999), these social practice perspectives of literacy have not delved deeply into the affective role of collective bodies in children’s literacy learning and psychosocial development. By turning to affect, this article sheds light on the psychic trauma and complex emotions students experience as they intra-act with particular literacy texts/objects, which are viewed here as active agents or participants. Additionally, it opens us up to the liveness of classroom environments: the movements, relations, sounds, and multimodal vibrations (Stoever, 2016) that emerge within literacy classrooms to catch us by surprise. Affective analyses bring these everyday transcorporeal encounters into sharper view and enable us to closely attend to, as well as trouble, the steady accumulation of emotional experiences – what may often appear to be “daily insignificances” (Seigworth, 1999) but are, in fact, psychically powerful and even traumatic.

Author

• Bessie Dernikos, Florida Atlantic University