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The Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education pp 105–120Cite as

Body Matters: The Critical Contribution of Affect in School Classrooms and Beyond

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Part of the book series: Professional and Practice-based Learning ((PPBL,volume 11))

Abstract

How do passions, emotions and desires play out pedagogically in classrooms and other learning settings? In this chapter, I investigate the workings of affectivity within school classrooms and teaching more broadly by exploring intensities, sensations or energies that can be discharged not only through human bodies, but also objects and spaces. Deploying data fragments drawn from video case-studies conducted as part of a national study of professional teaching standards and teacher professional learning in which teachers (in this case, school geography teachers) and their students took part, I trace affective relations and embodiment in action utilising an analytic of assemblage. I draw on concepts from actor-network theory and poststructuralist theory that invokes the work of Deleuze to make an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching and learning and the value of investigating affectivity in a way that breaks with subject-centredness and the privilege granted to the human/individual. Exploring teaching and learning as practised affords a strong sense of the embodied and affective terrain of teaching as a profession and invites attention to the role that affectivity, as an ‘unruly practice’, can play in challenging institutional norms in classrooms, as well as our currently established systemic concerns in education with metrics, measures and outcomes. Affect ‘escapes’ or operates below the threshold of these concerns and provides transgressive possibilities. Taking the ‘affective turn’ in education challenges us to better recognise the interweaving of cognition, emotion and action in learning settings, while forging new directions for curriculum and pedagogies wherein the roles of bodies and other material processes and their affective potential are acknowledged and embraced.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    By ‘official’ accounts, I mean accounts made by governments and policy advisors that appear to be under the influence of ‘the kind of policy empiricism that focuses on measures rather than meaning in its appraisal of educational activities’ (Smith et al. 2010, p. 3). Neo-liberal discourses and agendas uphold such empiricism.

  2. 2.

    Within education, sociomaterial studies derive largely from, and in dialogue with, scholarly-intellectual interest in actor-network theory. They extend to an interest in complexity theory and cultural-historical activity theory (see most particularly, Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Fenwick et al. 2011).

  3. 3.

    Spanning 2007–2010, this Linkage Project was conducted in association with the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association with affiliates in five major Australian states, including Partner Investigator status for the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the teacher registration authority in Victoria (Victorian Institute of Teaching).

  4. 4.

    For each of eleven classrooms in eight schools and three major Australian states, two lessons, each lasting around 50 min, were video-recorded using three cameras. One camera focused on the teacher, a second on individual students as part of a working group, and a third on the whole class. Using as catalyst the video-record from the whole-class camera, with the teacher camera image inserted as a picture-in-picture image in one corner of the display, teachers were invited to make a reconstructive account of the lesson events deemed critical to student learning. Similarly, students were invited to make an account of lesson events, using as stimulus the video-record from the teacher camera, with the individual students’ camera image inserted as a picture-in-picture image in one corner of the display.

  5. 5.

    As part of learning school Geography, Simon’s students are learning to be bodies in a certain way, for example, observing bodies, fieldsketching bodies, trained bodies. As Simon comments: ‘This is really the first year where we start training them as geographers’.

  6. 6.

    As used here, the term ‘bodies’ is both metaphorical and anthropomorphic. Regarding the former, the body itself figures as metaphor. Sea and soil serve as bodies of knowledge which interact with human bodies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Dianne Mulcahy

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  1. Dianne Mulcahy
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Correspondence to Dianne Mulcahy .

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  1. School of Teacher Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia

    Bill Green

  2. School of Education, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Nick Hopwood

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Mulcahy, D. (2015). Body Matters: The Critical Contribution of Affect in School Classrooms and Beyond. In: Green, B., Hopwood, N. (eds) The Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00140-1_7

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