"I Felt All of the Emotions of Her": Emotional Rules in a Media Literacy Course

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Circulation of Affect, Emotion, Materiality, and Différance in Literacies

Abstract

English education scholarship has long emphasized the potentials and possibilities of using literature to discuss race, power, and oppression in English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Such class discussions are always imbued with emotions, and these emotions take the shape of various emotional rules that are enacted through social constructions such as race and gender. Using qualitative research methodologies, this study explores how teachers and students in a racially diverse critical media literacy course negotiated, reified, and subverted various emotional rules in class discussions of Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give. This exploration asks teachers and researchers to consider how emotion might afford and constrain the anti-racist possibilities of literature pedagogies in ELA classrooms.

Author

• Mary Neville, New Mexico State University