"We Felt That Electricity": Creative Writing as Affective Entanglement in and Beyond a Secondary Classroom

• In Event: Response-able Pedagogies in Educational Research: Four Studies Using Posthuman Methodologies Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives: Overall, this paper explores ways in which experiences of co-creation and co-engagement expanded (in) a creative writing class. Affective, and other, entanglements among student writers, their materials, their ideas, and their subjects were also already entangled with their teacher’s own learning, her writing, and the morphing curriculum and the positioning of this class as a research space.

Perspectives: Moments are explored with attention to various literacy events as “partly unconscious, felt activities with and around texts” (Ehret, 2018, p. 563). While many scholars (e.g.i.e. Massumi, 2010) differentiate among affect and emotion, others assert that while they are separable, “they are contiguous; they slide into each other; they stick and cohere, even when they are separated” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 231). In consideration of how Anwaruddin (2016) uses this term to underpin his call for an affective turn in critical literacy practices, I draw here from the space where affect, emotion, feeling, impulse, and desire intermingle (Anwaruddin, 2016, p. 387).

Methods: Data were produced over a full school year of the researcher attending classes and planning times, and working in collaboration. The school, a diverse magnet school for high-achieving students in a large urban district, operated on an A/B day schedule. On each A day, I attended a creative writing class and Grade 10 English class. During observations and conversations, I took notes and made audio/video recordings and photographs. Diffractive analysis provided the opportunity to read and re-read moments, particularly “irreducible snags” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), through theories (in)formed by theories of nonviolence (Author, 2018), affect (Ahmed, 2010; Anwaruddin, 2016; Rowsell, 2020), and response-able methodologies (Barad, 2007).

Data Sources: Traditional sources of data generation included six long (1-2 hour) semi-structured interviews, more than 10 shorter interviews and many candid conversations, photos, video and audio recordings from over 100 hours of group activities, teacher- and student-produced artifacts.

Results: In addition to bringing theories of affect and affective connection into diffractive relations with events, those theories are activated in discussion of some of the instructional approaches that emerged in the classroom space. The methodologies activated were response-able; and many of the pedagogies that emerged here were response-able. Affect theory and attention to our response-ability as researchers and teachers highlights the possibility and the significance of viewing literacy events as producing their own value (Ehret, 2018, p. 570).

Significance: In trying to force this resistant data to stand still long enough to produce a reflection of events, the mirror has turned up empty. What other moments of electricity are absent from our research simply because they cannot be adequately re-presented through the means we have inherited? This analysis aims to both challenge representational methodologies in education research (St. Pierre, 2016) and celebrate what becomes possible in classrooms where there is a value on affective connections.

Author

• Jessica Cira Rubin, University of Waikato