Feeling Failure, Managing Absurdity, Troubling Happiness: Tracing Teachers' Affective Performances in Their "Becomings"

• In Event: Critical Understandings Through Identity: Building Bridges Across Educational Contexts

Abstract

In this paper, we take up the affordances of affect theory (Ahmed, 2010) to understand how novice teachers prepared within a DSE-informed teacher education program, experience the work of inclusive teaching. We trace the attachments and orientations that marked the “becoming” of three teachers as they transitioned from teacher candidates to teachers of record. In considering how they were affectively moved towards or away from practices of inclusivity and students with disabilities, we recognized the discomfort of failure to produce an idealized inclusion, the absurdities of everyday schooling that required pedagogical interruptions, and the gendered scripts of co-teaching that could produce a “feminist killjoy.” We suggest that affect theory can help to “complexify” our descriptions of the enactments of inclusion.

Authors

• Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Sarah L. Schlessinger, Long Island University - Brooklyn