Affects and Diversity in the Classroom: Everyday Experiences in Santiago de Chile's Schools

• In Event: Dis/ability in the Americas: The Intersections of Education, Power, and Identity

Abstract

This article explores the role played by affects and emotions in the way students labelled as having special educational needs (SEN) or students with disabilities learn. I present classroom lessons as situated practices in which affects and emotions shape the arrangement of learning possibilities. My aim is to show the centrality of the “work of emotions” in the way in which these groups of students and teachers build their relationships in the classroom, recess and other school space-time. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, field notes describe diverse moments and spaces at the observed schools. They make clear how affects are at the core of education, and how teaching and learning are embodied practices that cannot be understood without their affective dimension.

Author

• Rosario Palacios, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Centro de Justicia Educacional