Lowercase truth: Affect as Abstract Art in Research on Seventh-Grade Argumentative Writing

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

Abstract

Objectives: This paper describes the use of visual arts-based methods to address the limitations of language in representing the affective nature of a study of argumentative writing in a 7th grade classroom. Students wrote argumentative essays grounded in important lived experiences such as the loss of a friend from a car accident, fear of being separated from family because of America’s immigration policy, and discrimination in school as the result of gender and race. Such visceral experiences were challenging to represent in the research in digital contexts. Thus, I asked:

How might visual modes of representation (particularly abstraction in painting) attend to the limitations of language in representing affect in education research?

Theoretical Framework: The study is situated within feminist, post-structural approaches that critique language’s failure to map words onto meaning (Britzman, 2000; Dutro, 2013; Dutro, 2008; St. Pierre, 2000) and affect theory’s foundational recognition regarding affect as something that belies certainty such that conversion of affect into words produces a “brutality” in relation to the “felt” experience (Gibbs, 2012; Stewart, 2007).

Methods: This paper emerged from a qualitative study in a 7th grade language arts classroom in a mid-sized city in the mountain region of the United States in which the teacher and researcher modeled vulnerable and visceral writing (Dutro, 2013) and invited students to ground argumentative writing in these important life experiences. In my role a participant observer, I invited youth to represent the affective nature of the writing project by creating visual art that would speak to this ‘felt’ dimension (Jongeward, 2009). I used my own photography as a mode to analyze students’ use of color as a method for representing affect in digital contexts. I also analyzed data by identifying emerging themes, with attention to the content of students writing and also to students’ expressed and observed experiences with the project (Miles, Huberman & Saldana, 2014).

Data sources included: audio and video data from select classes, audio and transcription of interviews with students, fieldnotes, and student’s visual art.

Results: Youth chose to use color and abstraction to represent the affective dimension of the writing project when invited to give voice to the felt dimension, and this method offered several benefits: it invited them to challenge singularity in representing affect by allowing them to illustrate several contrasting feelings in a single frame, offered them entry to speak to the embodied nature of writing, and supported them in avoiding description through language in cases where experiences were indescribable in words alone.

Scholarly Significance: While qualitative researchers have explored affect in the context of education research (Anwaruddin, 2015; Boldt, Lewis & Leander, 2015) and arts-based education researchers have looked at the use of visual art to attend to embodied dimensions of experience in research (Leavy, 2009), there has not yet been a bridge between these two fields to make explicit what ABER offers us as researchers of affect in school literacy in ways that maintain affect’s potential to exceed language’s limits, especially when young people story challenging experiences in school literacy practices.

Author

• Ellie Haberl, University of Colorado - Boulder