Abstract
This chapter contributes to current debates in school and museum education concerning the role and contribution of affect to learning. Taken to be the transmission of force or intensity across bodies, and to precede processes of cognition, affect serves to challenge currently established cognitivist, constructivist and representationalist forms of learning and knowledge in education. Guided by Deleuzian philosophy and drawing on case data collected over the course of a project investigating the potentialities of affective learning at the museum, it is argued that museum learning is ‘sticky’: it becomes attached through particular affects and has the capacity to leave a lasting impression. An outcome of encounters involving bodies, objects and affects, it brings forth new capacities for thinking, doing and being. The empirical material worked shows that bodies are a chief site of securing the circulation of affects, and that affective capacities of bodies are central to learning and can travel from one learning location (museum) to another (classroom). Importantly, these capacities can be highly political and ethical; they can activate learners’ ethical and political imaginations and induce attentiveness to otherness. Altogether, I propose that better understanding the phenomenon of learning and how it can be made to stick is a significant project in education. It affords consideration of the complex distributed agency (and pedagogic responsibility) that emerges from the breaking down of the subject-object and mind-body binaries and provides significant insights into and possibilities for a renewed practice of school and museum education.
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Notes
- 1.
While cognitivist, constructivist and representationalist accounts take a variety of directions and follow a number of influences, they share the understanding that a traditional knowing subject lies at the heart of learning and that this subject is separable from its relations with the world. Challenging cognitivist views of learning as largely centred on ‘mind’, sociocultural theories of learning tend to prevail in education. These theories are underscored by constructivism as a theory of knowledge. In representationalist knowledge practice, a clear cut is made between matter and meaning with the latter being the privileged term and practice. Knowledge is treated a something that is both independent of, and contained within, singular entities precluding a view of learning as affective flow.
- 2.
Melbourne Museum is a natural and cultural history museum located in Melbourne, the capital city of the Australian state of Victoria. Little Lon forms part of a single exhibition on the history of Melbourne, The Melbourne Story, and comprises a display which includes two cottages which are physically identical to those that would have populated the lanes of an inner-city area bounded by Lonsdale, Exhibition, Little Lonsdale and Spring Streets in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
- 3.
Baker (2008) draws a distinction between didactic affect which is anticipated by museums and delirious affect which is accidental and chaotic. In generating meaning in museums, ‘both affective dimensions—didactic and delirious—operate simultaneously and are perhaps experientially inseparable’.
- 4.
- 5.
Placing distance between those one does not know on public transport ill affords ‘opening oneself up to creative affective connections with the Other’ (Zembylas 2006).
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Mulcahy, D. (2016). ‘Sticky’ Learning: Assembling Bodies, Objects and Affects at the Museum and Beyond. In: Coffey, J., Budgeon, S., Cahill, H. (eds) Learning Bodies. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 2. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0306-6_13
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