Affective assemblages: body matters in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms
Dianne Mulcahy*
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic 3010, Australia
Set within the affective turn in cultural and social theory, in this paper, I explore the significance of materiality and matter, most specifically, bod-ily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school class-rooms. The received view in education is that affect is tantamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily affectivity, technol-ogies and texts, are used by teachers and learners to support and advance teaching and learning. Telling a sociomaterial story, I account for how materials participate in pedagogic practice and for what is per-formed through this participation (e.g. corporeal capacity, changed power relations regarding the subjectivities of teacher and learner and teaching and learning). Drawing on video case data collected as part of a national study, and utilising an analytic of assemblage, I trace affective relations in action towards making an argument about the centrality of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching-learning events in school classrooms and beyond. Registering bodily as intensity, affect effects change in ped-agogical relationships, impelling acknowledgement of its substantive nat-ure and its political import. Altogether, bodily matter matters. Implications of this mattering for education policy and practice are drawn out.
Keywords: affect; pedagogic practice; embodiment; materiality; actor-network theory
Introduction
Set within the context of neo-liberal education policy reform and concerned about current manifestations of the discourse of the centrality of the teacher (Larsen 2010) and the increasing pressure in the teaching profession for ensuring professional standards, measurable outcomes and accountability of practice (Webster-Wright 2009), this paper investigates the role of the embodied and affectively intensive in teachers’ work. ‘Evidence is building that indicates that the potency of quality teaching is not restricted to pedagogical techniques solely concerned with subject content and academic
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ISSN 1468-1366 print/ISSN 1747-5104 online
processes, but that its efficacy also lies in attending to the affective dimen-sion of teaching and learning’ (Lovat 2010, 491). Attending to this dimen-sion affords not only a strong sense of teacher subjectivity, but also of bodily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school class-rooms. A focus on bodily matter in educational practice is important in the present educational-political conjuncture where means-ends rationality via
‘objective’ measures (e.g. standardised testing) rules (Au 2011). It has the potential to challenge the liberal notion of the self-contained individual which is widely held in education and to address issues of change and trans-formation in classrooms. It affords recognition of the idea that materiality is governed by relations of indeterminacy, contingency and openness (Black-man 2008) and that far from being passive or inert, matter is a lively force that actively participates in events (Bennett 2010). As Leander, Phillips, and Headrick Taylor (2010, 339–40) have it, a focus on bodily matter, specifi -cally, embodied affective engagements, ‘is a complex and pressing concern in education research’. Bringing a spatial perspective to bear, they ask:
‘How do children enter into positive emotional relationships with places of learning? How might we move beyond folk theories emphasising surface features alone (e.g. classroom décor) or human-centred theories only (e.g. student–teacher relations)? How could school places be made more affec-tively malleable to become more equitable? (Leander, Phillips, and Headrick Taylor 2010, 340).
The article proceeds in three sections. First, the research that informs the concept of affect as used in the article is reviewed and particular perspec-tives by which affect in education is understood are outlined. Second, details describing the methods used to collect the empirical data for the research project above are given and data from this project are worked via the telling of two tales of bodily affectivity in classroom teaching and its effects. The third section draws together the understandings and analyses of affect in pedagogic practices and argues for a shift in focus, in both educa-tion research and pedagogic practice, from affect as an inner psychological state of human being, to affect as embodied practices of assembly, human and otherwise. The implications of this shift for classroom teaching are drawn out and the distinctiveness of the contribution of the practice-ori-ented, assemblage analytic of actor-network theory to studies of affect is discussed.
Clearing some definitional ground: affect, bodily affectivity and assemblage
As Zembylas (2007b, 19) has it, two spectres haunt classrooms – bodies and affects, the latter being my main concern here. Unlike popular discourse where the terms affect and emotion often overlap and refer to inner psycho-logical states of being, in contemporary academic discourse,3 these terms
‘follow different logics’ (Massumi 1995, 88). ‘Affect and emotion are at the same time different and similar. They are different in the sense that they belong to distinct modes of existence, but they are similar in that emotion is substantially a product of affect’ (Watkins 2006, 273). A ‘social’4 rather than psychological construct, affect is used to refer to intensities or energies that produce new affective and embodied connections. Affect, writes Thrift (2008, 116), ‘is not … reducible to the affections or perceptions of an indi-vidual subject’. It is ‘a passionate, shared, and embodied intensity that erupts beyond the register of consciousness’(Gibson-Graham 2006, 203).
While irreducibly bodily, affect is not exclusively a matter of individual human bodies. As Thrift (2008, 276) has it, embodiment is ‘a linked, hybrid
field of flesh and accompanying objects, rather than a series of individual bodies, intersubjectively linked’ and, importantly for the purposes of this paper, adds: ‘I take the presence of objects to be particularly important because they provide new means of linkage … new folds, if you like’ (2008, 276). As intensities, sensations or energies that can be discharged through objects, affects make it possible to read many other things, such as space and the environment, as affective’(Navaro-Yashin 2009, 12).
Deleuze and Guattari’s translator, Brian Massumi (1995), whose essay
Affect/Affection. Neither word denotes a personal feeling…Affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution of that body’s capacity to act. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, xvi)
Gilbert (2004, 3) elaborates thus:
Elsewhere, Massumi writes that ‘affect is indeed unformed and unstructured but that it is nevertheless highly organised and effectively analysable (it is not entirely containable in knowledge, but is analysable in effect, as effect)’ (Massumi 1996, p. 237). So ‘affect’ is a term which denotes a more or less organised experience, an experience probably with empowering or disempow-ering consequences, registered at the level of the physical body, and not nec-essarily to be understood in linguistic terms.
Affect in the Deleuzian sense, according to MacLure:
is not feeling or emotion. It is a kind of ‘prepersonal intensity’ which may be ‘captured’ and ‘qualified’ (i.e., given qualities) as emotion (Massumi 2002b). It does not reside within individual subjects, nor in an ‘ intersubjec-tive’ commingling of meanings or consciousnesses. It precedes, and exceeds, language, biography and cognition. Affect registers on the body. It is carried by facial expressions, tone of voice, breath and sounds, which do not operate as signs, yet are not mere epiphenomena. And, precisely because affect ‘affects’ bodies, it can be transmitted, and is intimately social. (2010, 284)
And, one might add material: it ‘registers on the body’; it ‘“affects” bodies’. Furthermore, affect is political in the sense that ‘power is an inextricable aspect of how bodies come together, move, and dwell’ (Zembylas 2007a, xiv). ‘Affect maps the micro-political relations that constitute the beginnings of social change’ (Hickey-Moody and Crowley 2010, 401).
A relational line of thinking decentres locations of affect (e.g. bodies, objects, spaces) by reconceptualising it in terms of assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Cooper 1998; Wise 2005). ‘The complex forms of rela-tionality that come into being are often called actor-networks’ (Latimer 2009, 7), or assemblages (Latimer 2009, 7) or agencements (Callon 2005) – conjunctures of human beings, human bodies, technical devices, inscriptions, and so on that are ‘partial, dispersed, fragile, tentative’ (Cooper 1998, 110).
Affect in education: poststructuralist perspectives –attending particularly to actor-network theory
The body has been a major source of interest in the humanities and social sciences for over two decades and the affective turn (Clough and Halley 2007) can be seen as a continuation of interest in the body by other means (Blackman et al. 2008). The received view in education is that affect is tan-tamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily affectivity, technologies and texts, are used by teachers and learners to support and advance teaching and learning. Joining with and building upon the work of others who are developing an alternative to humanist studies of education (Sørensen 2009; Fenwick and Edwards 2010; Nespor 1994; Landri 2000), I adopt a posthumanist stance, and account for how materials participate in pedagogic practice and for what is performed through this participation (e.g. corporeal capacity, changed power relations regarding the subjectivities of teacher and learner and teaching and learning).
In making analyses of pedagogic practices that emphasise the role of affect, I draw on theoretical resources associated with the work of Deleuze, Latour and Tarde (see, for example, Latour 2002, 2004; Tarde 1902; Deleuze 1995). The ‘theory’with which I particularly engage is material semiotics or, more commonly, actor-network theory (Latour 2005; Law 2009a). Across this work, bodies are framed as fundamentally relational processes: they can be defined by their capacity to affect and be affected. Thus, affect refers to changes in what bodies are and are not capable of. No longer conceived as predominantly individual, personal and private, affects flow through and between bodies and other assemblages in complex ways (Ringrose 2010).
An empirical version of poststructuralism, actor-network theory is ‘a dis-parate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously gen-erated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located’ (Law 2009b, 141). Instead of asking whythings happen, the material semiotics of actor-network theory asks ‘how they occur. How they arrange themselves. How the materials of the world (social, technical, documentary, natural, human, animal) get themselves done’ (Law 2008, 632, original emphasis).
Law (2009b, 1, original emphasis) continues:
If we think performatively, then reality is not assumed to be independent, pri-ori, definite, singular or coherent. Rather the logic is turned upside down. If reality appears (as it usually does) to be independent, prior, definite, singular or coherent then this is because it is being done that way. … Practices enact realities … This means that if we want to understand how realities are done or to explore their politics, then we have to attend carefully to practices and ask how they work.
And practices are?
For my purposes, practices are detectable and somewhat ordered sets of mate-rial-semiotic relations. To study practices is therefore to undertake the analyti-cal and empirianalyti-cal task of exploring possible patterns of relations, and how it is that these get assembled in particular locations. It is to treat the real as whatever it is that is being assembled, materially and semiotically in a scene of analytical interest. (Law 2009b, 1, original emphasis)
The turn to performance has been taken in various disciplinary fields (e.g. human geography, cultural studies, contemporary political theory) including education. As Zembylas (2003, 112) argues, the character of emotion is per-formative‘which makes it a particularly affective and direct way of knowing’. Various criticisms have been levelled at actor-network theory. As Mutch (2002, 483–7) has it, ‘actor-network perspectives fail to escape … from the level of process’, and, in so doing,‘ignore the stratified nature of human soci-ety’. Lacking an‘ontology of depth’, they fail to recognise‘the relationship of persons with society (for want of a better word to describe persistent patter-nings of human activity)’ as well as reduce the nature of persons. ‘ANT [actor-network theory] has a flat view of human agents, reducing them to effects and denying the embodied, emotional nature of human existence. This existence is still flatter, however, when it comes to social relations’. When working the empirical material, part of my purpose is to challenge this view.
In holding to the notion that reality does not precede practices but is made through them, actor-network theory attends to the idea that practices have a political life. ‘Practices organize and reproduce the distribution of power, knowledge, and the inequalities that go with them’ (Nicolini, Gher-ardi, and Yanow 2003, 24). They have built-in normativities, contributing to
‘some worlds-in-progress but not to others’ (Moser 2008, 99). The question becomeswhich worlds we want practices to make?
The project in question: data and method assemblage
were sourced from teachers and students via video recordings of accom-plished teaching with identification of accomplished teachers being made by way of purposeful sampling. Thus, members of the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association and its affiliates, the peak professional associations for school geography in Australia, were invited to nominate teachers who are widely regarded professionally, using various criteria including reputa-tion for accomplishment within the field of geographic education, years of experience teaching school geography, teaching qualifications, etc.
In an effort to‘capture’ the specificities of practice, including theflow of teacher action and embodied judgement, the approach adopted used techni-cally complex methods for video-recording classrooms.6 These video records were supplemented with post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with stu-dents and the teacher. Pre-lesson interviews with each teacher were also con-ducted.
Altogether, 11 case studies (22 lessons altogether) were conducted in eight schools (government and government; metropolitan and non-metropolitan) in three major Australian states. In all cases, video recordings were made over the course of a sequence of two lessons, each lasting for approximately 50 minutes. The two fieldwork tales told below concern two of these case studies. Set within a large, metropolitan, private boys’school and a medium-sized, rural, private co-educational school, respectively, the classes comprise a Year 9 geography class and a Year 8 geography class. Taking practices of assembly as the locus for analysis, I explore ‘moments’ in classrooms that move and affect teachers and learners and the contribu-tion of these moments to the pedagogic process. In so doing, I document the agencement that makes up affect: the arrangement of people, bodies, objects, and so on that constitutes it. Place locations and names of teachers and stu-dents have been altered for reasons of confidentiality.
Affective assemblages: bodily affectivity and pedagogic practices
Sandra’s story:‘Miss, is that really necessary?’
Already, I think, it is clear that Sandra, in her teaching preparation, is tapping into the boys’ attachments to football teams, their desire to follow and possibly play league football in the future: ‘So we’re going to do lots of skills but through something that hopefully will appeal to the boys because, with them, you’ve got to have something interesting. They don’t like going into classes where they have textbooks so they just read through it and answer questions’. Textbooks do not serve apparently, as objects of interest and appeal (affective objects). They are neither expressive nor induce the sort of affect that might make the boys further ‘catch’ learning. They do not propel perhaps enough of an embodied response. The ‘hook’ that Sandra settles on (or enters into relationship with) to get the boys nego-tiating the terms of their engagement with learning is a laminated ‘data broadsheet’, on which an image of a premiership poster appears (see respec-tively, Figures 1 and 2).
Triggering what I will call an affective moment, Sandra delivers the data-sheet to a desk at which a pair of boys sit. An intense exchange around the datasheet immediately follows. Pointing at the image of the poster on the broadsheet, David says to his partner at the double desk ‘She had to put that in, didn’t she’. Commentary on the poster continues:
David: Miss, is that really necessary?
Sandra: Absolutely … necessary and I’ve put it in twice just to reinforce the fact that Geelong won in 2007.
Zac: Why?
Sandra: Because we’ve been waiting a very long time!
A self-described ‘Cats’ tragic’, Sandra performs an identity that provokes an emotional engagement by the boys, here, perhaps, distaste for her choice of football team, or disappointment at the lack of premiership success of their chosen teams, as I infer from the ironic tone of the comment:‘She had to put that in, didn’t she’. Still caught up in the experience of the football grandfinal on the weekend immediately prior to the lesson, affect registers bodily through Sandra’s gestures and visceral productions of voice – ‘Absolutely … necessary’;‘Because we’ve been waiting averylong time!’Intimately social, or better, relational, it flows through and between bodies, human and non-human. As Hickey-Moody (2009, 274) has it, the‘enmeshment of individual,
“human” subjective traits’ (e.g. team loyalty and attachment, expressivity, desire) ‘with a non-human medium’ (data broadsheet, poster) that incites an affective response, is affect. Affect is a‘material exchange’ and interestingly,
‘a kind of pedagogy’ – a ‘relational practice through which some kind of knowledge is produced’(Hickey-Moody 2009, 273). And, as I go on to dis-cuss, affect as material exchange is politically inflected.
The poster which appears twice on the information sheet is performative: it is productive of action, interpretation and consequence (MacLure et al. 2010, 498). An affective object, it occasions pointing by David, discussion between David and his partner Zac and, arguably, a shift in the balance of power between students and teacher: ‘Miss, is that really necessary?’ The deployment of the poster by a teacher who, as Zac reported at interview,
‘can have a joke’, brings about banter between the boys and the teacher. Following MacLure et al. (2010, 498), David’s facetious question draws its power from its ambivalent status and location: between sincerity and mock-ery, between challenge to the teacher and admiration for her unfettered enthusiasm for her team and its victory. ‘It is not surprising’ writes MacLure et al. (2010, 497), that ‘humour, silence, and the ambivalent respect of mim-icry have been identified as the strategies of subaltern subjects faced with disciplinary power’. The use of humour in this classroom signals that a ped-agogy of friendship, or as Albrecht-Crane (2005) has it, pedped-agogy as friend-ship, is in place. ‘Such a pedagogy sees individuals as “interlocutors”, engaged in dialogue and exchange … Dialogue becomes a “game” … in which identities and positions are established and disjoined and participants multiply and produce new modes of being together’ (Albrecht-Crane 2005, 492). These multiple participants, I posit, include materials.
The curriculum artefact (data broadsheet) under consideration with its poster(s) co-mingles with the teacher’s evident pleasure in her team’s suc-cess and the boys’ ambivalent, embodied response, bringing an affective assemblage into effect. Materials in the form of the data broadsheet, the poster and the double desk at which David and Zac sit, in concert with human bodily matter (visceral productions of voice,fingers that point), come together to create effects, to initiate change: ‘Before I started geography, I thought it was just like colouring in, stuff like that, but she’s like brought a different thing to it’. And, if only momentarily, some of these effects unset-tle the balance of institutional positioning and power – ‘Miss, is that really necessary?’The boys’ impetus to learn, including to provoke and challenge, is based on them being affected by bodies, human and otherwise, providing the idea that the desire to learn has a bodily basis. As Albrecht-Crane (2005, 506) notes, ‘identity forms itself on the body, through people’s direct, experiential relation to the world’. Bodily affects, or bodily matter, matter. They are constitutive of learners and learning: ‘We only do geography for a semester, but I think I’ve learnt’.
Simone’s story: ‘I just couldn’t come today and not talk about this’
towards building knowledge about the workings of rivers in preparation for a future field trip to a river. Introducing the lesson thus: ‘We’re going to start looking at river landforms and the way rivers work in erosion, deposi-tion and transportadeposi-tion’, five or so minutes into it, she stops and says:
‘Before I start though … something pretty big has happened and I couldn’t
… not talk about it today’.
Showing a digital image of Burma, she proceeds to hold a lively class discussion about the impact of a tropical cyclone, Cyclone Nargis, which, as reported worldwide earlier in the day, has devastated southwestern Burma, and concludes in this way:
I just couldn’t come today and not talk about this … it’s a big deal. Sixty thousand people, that’s a bit of a big deal and Australia is currently tossing up (as to) how much support we should provide … That was just my little quick introduction;’cos we couldn’t live without that.
Here, I propose, teaching desire and intensive affective engagement are at work. Simone is at pains to instil not only a geographic but also a moral understanding of the magnitude of this cyclonic event for struggling Bur-mese farmers: ‘You’re a farmer and you don’t have much money and your house wasn’t made of bricks … and … has been swept away. You could be dead, some people in your family could be dead. The cyclone’s gone, are you still in danger?’
Her ‘shifting speeds and intensities of engagement’ with this event ‘do not just prompt thought, but also generate sensations resonating in the body as well as the brain’ (MacLure 2010, 282), as implied in this comment on listening students, made by Simone at the post-lesson interview:
The first thing I decided to do this morning was to talk about the cyclone. I added that to the [lesson]; that to me was important. Because one of the things I have been talking to them about is current events in geography. So, I thought I have to talk about this… Talking about the cyclone, that was unex-pected for me. I, I, that was just something, I just thought this morning, I’ve got to talk about this because I get excited. That was for me, a lot of them had not put that all together before. And, you can tell with that class when most of them are listening because they lean forward. There’s a few boys in there specially who … lean right forward and that sort of thing and get involved.
Caught up in an affective encounter, student bodies ‘lean right forward … and get involved’. As stated in Sandra’s story above, bodily matter, matters. It is constitutive of learners and learning. ‘Bodily affects, and so desires, are constitutive of subjectivity’ (Watkins 2008, 121) – students who ‘get involved’and, in so doing, presumably learn.
playing out in these data, however. A further affective assemblage centred on shifting subjectivity, here teacher transformation and self-work, is in evi-dence. While styling the decision to talk about the cyclone as an epistemic/ cognitive one − ‘I added that … because one of the things I have been talk-ing to them about is current events in geography’, the hesitations and felt intensity expressed in: ‘I, I’, ‘I’ve got to talk about this’, ‘’cos we couldn’t live without that’, and ‘I couldn’t … not talk about it today’, indicate other-wise. Simone is caught up in an experience, an amalgam of thought and emotion, that registers at the level of the physical body through ‘tone of voice, breath and sounds’ (MacLure 2010, 284) and marks a step change of some sort. ‘Affect is the concept of taking something on, of changing in relation to an experience or encounter’ (Hickey-Moody 2009, 273). What might Simone be thought to be taking on?
I suggest that this changing or taking on has to do with professional iden-tity and, along with Albrecht-Crane (2005, 508), posit that ‘identity operates by way of affective investments’. Here, I claim, we see an early career tea-cher: taking a pedagogic risk, departing from her lesson plan, and, in so doing, possibly drawing the attention of, or criticism from, her colleagues. As Thrift (2008, 172) has it, ‘issues like identity and belonging quiver with affective energy’. Given the curriculum systems within which lessons oper-ate, it is not surprising that the unexpected pedagogic departure made is soon contained: ‘That was just my little quick introduction; ’cos we couldn’t live without that’. Over the course of the discussion of Cyclone Nargus, Simone appears to apologise to the students for being off-topic:‘Not to do with rivers ok, but I just can’t ignore this at the moment’and‘I know this is not quite to do with rivers’, affirming the idea that this assemblage involves her self-work (professional identity work). Moving from ‘on-topic’to ‘off-topic’ implies a pedagogical relationship in which not only Simone’s students, but also Simone herself, is mired. Using a Deleuzian frame, Hickey-Moody (2009, 273) suggests that affect ‘is the materiality of change: “the passage from one state to another”’ (Deleuze 1988, 49). Simone’s passage from one pedagogic and identity state to another is made materially. It registers bodily, corpore-ally:‘I, I, that was just…I get excited’.
And, what Simone ‘just can’t ignore’ is the very thing that her students connect with, showing how affect brings student learning into effect. As one of Simone’s students reports at interview: ‘[The things that helped my learn-ing were] thlearn-ings like the casual talks, like about thlearn-ings, not just the topic that we are learning, things that happen on the actual news and the happen-ings around the world’. Through pedagogies that affect, students learn to be affected – ‘Also her stories … she was explaining about going to the airport with her bags, and she was getting tired so she dropped them off her, to show deposition in a river … There is another [story] about how her dam, how the water was dark and just how the drought affected where she lived’
An active participant in this practice, bodies other than human bodies, play their part; they too can be defined by their capacity to affect and effect teaching and learning: ‘If I couldn’t have my data projector, if you teach riv-ers, … without having those allied images or anything like that to be able to show, I wouldn’t be able to do as well as I can’, a view corroborated by one of Simone’s students: ‘The animation really helped … It actually showed the actual physical movement of things and how they [river pro-cesses] actually do it. Instead of just explaining and picturing it in your mind, you can actually see it. And it’s really good’. As Watkins (2006, 272) has it in theorising pedagogy, ‘the impact of bodies affecting other bodies’ is ‘where the significance lies’. The affects generated by the socio-material practices traced here equip Simone’s students with an increased capacity to act while ‘breaking with both subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point’(Venn 2010, 129).
Affectivity matters: ‘She’s like a good teacher … she can have a joke’
In making my assemblage account using the case examples above, I have emphasised that affect is not a personal property of the teacher. It is assem-bled −a complex and uncertain gathering of energies, words, gestures, com-mitments, affections, artefacts, bodily feelings, routines and habits. I have attempted to demonstrate the thingliness (Navaro-Yashin 2009) of affect and the significance of affective flows in classroom practice. Rather than some-thing ‘personal’ − bringing intrinsic teacher qualities or potentialities to bear as an individualised psychological view of self has it – teaching and learn-ing is constituted in assemblages of a social (e.g. professional socialisation, identity formation) and material kind (e.g. curriculum materials; teacher ges-ture, posture and embodied action). Thinking pedagogy as an assemblage affords a sense of collective responsibility. Pedagogic relations are not the exclusive concern of the teacher. They are embedded in distributed, hetero-geneous and specific practices, so responsibilities for developing and main-taining them are similarly distributed and heterogeneous. This opens up a range of processes that form possibilities for a variety of elements to partici-pate and create effects. The workings of bodies, technologies, texts and teaching desire come into view.
take it that pedagogy plays out differently for students from different social and cultural backgrounds and other configurations/assemblages. Bernstein’s (1975) analysis of forms of pedagogic practice is of relevance here. Mindful of his argument that there are significant differences in the social class assumptions of visible and invisible pedagogy,8 it cannot be assumed that all students in Sandra and Simone’s classes are affected by‘passionate peda-gogy’, or affected in similar ways. Pedagogic practices and affects are entirely dependent on which other practices and affects they form an assem-blage with. In a Bernsteinian framework, the nature and structure of school pedagogic practice needs to be in continuity with family codes and prac-tices. Thus, there can be dangers of essentialising and homogenising what it is to be a student and what it is to experience ‘passionate pedagogy’.
With an emphasis on affective encounters and the affective dimension of classroom teaching, I join with other researchers who are committed to cor-recting a cognitivist bias in education and to engaging quite specifically with the materiality of classrooms and bodies (Zembylas 2007a; see also,Saito 2010; McWilliam 1996). As McWilliam (1996, 373, my emphasis) acknowl-edges, ‘I want to understand the part that bodies play in ways that invite and anticipate uncertainties andirregularities in the performance of teaching and learning as a dramatic enactment of cultural exchange and social trans-formation’. Focusing up bodily affectivity in the pedagogic practices of school classrooms affords such understanding. Simone’s unexpected ‘talking about the cyclone’ is a case in point. ‘When you affect something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn … You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold’(Massumi 2002a, original emphasis).
This exploration also invites attention to the role that affect and emotion, as ‘unruly practices’, can play in challenging our currently established sys-temic concerns in education with (received views of) scientificity (e.g. met-rics, measures, league tables). From a learner perspective,‘having a joke’is a/ the measure of the good or quality teacher: ‘She’s like a good teacher, laid back, like she’s serious in a way but she can have a joke’. Teacher humour and informality challenge‘the sort of logic which underpins a whole“quality” literature in which teaching “outcomes”are no more than the sum of what the learner can do after the pedagogical event’(McWilliam 1996, 368). Having a joke has more to do with student being than doing: ‘being-in’ the teacher– student relationship (Giles 2011) and being relaxed in this relationship.
like affectivity itself, is lively, that is, not governed by a pre-set system of judgement–such as performance standards and related measures and metrics commonly are – and pre-set teaching outcomes – ‘what the learner can do after the pedagogical event’(McWilliam 1996, 368).
Affective assemblages: ‘In affect we are never alone’
For Massumi (2002a), ‘a body’s ability to affect or be affected – its charge of affect – isn’t something fixed’. He continues: ‘In affect we are never alone. That’s because affects in Spinoza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participa-tion in processes larger than ourselves’ (Massumi 2002a, original emphasis). Materiality too concerns ways of connecting. In actor-network theory, mate-riality is not a simple matemate-riality in which there is a priori ‘stuff’. It is ‘the achieved ability to connect to other entities’ (Sørensen 2009, 177). And, therein lies the political potential of bodily affectivity and other bodily mat-ter. A focus on bodily affectivity and materiality has the potential to chal-lenge the currently established discourse of the centrality of the teacher (Larsen 2010). There is an openness of movement as indicated in Zac’s complimentary comment about his teacher who ‘can have a joke’, this jok-ing capacity bejok-ing not so much an inherent quality of the teacher herself, as away of connecting to others, here, students and curriculum material, or bet-ter perhaps, curriculum mabet-terial connecting with both the teacher and the students. ‘Good’teaching is in contact with the moving dimensions of expe-rience that allow for affective connection. ‘Basically the “good” is affec-tively defined as what brings maximum potential and connection to the situation. It is defined in terms of becoming’ (Massumi 2002a). In tracing the workings of bodily affectivity and materiality, we arrive at connections in the making – jokes, irony, casual talks and stories – with ‘good’ peda-gogic practice being, among other things, a matter of creating conditions of possibility for these emergent connections.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of the paper was presented at the Australian Association for Research in Education Annual Conference in Melbourne in 2010. I would like to thank the students, teachers and project partners, the Australian Geography Teachers’ Association, the Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the Victorian Institute of Teaching, along with the Australian Research Council, who made this research possible.
Notes
Teachers’ Association of Victoria and the teacher registration authority in Victo-ria (VictoVicto-rian Institute of Teaching).
2. ‘The concept of the assemblage forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari (1988) denotes the ‘amalgam of places, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work that together constitute … knowledge/practices’ (Watson and Huntington 2008, 272, citing Wright 2005, 908). As Law (2009a, 146) comments, there is little difference between the term agencement − translated as ‘assemblage’ in English − and the term actor-network (heterogeneous network). Thus, I use these terms, or better per-haps, analytical metaphors, interchangeably. This usage is common in contem-porary actor-network theory accounts.
3. As Massumi (1995, 88) has it, ‘there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary spe-cific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification’. Contemporary academic discourses of affect ‘sit’ under the broad umbrella of poststructuralism. The primacy of language in post-structuralist theory has how-ever been questioned with emphasis now placed on ‘non-representational theory’(Thrift 2008).
4. In Massumi’s (1995, 91) account of affect as intensity, ‘intensity is asocial, but not presocial– itincludessocial elements’(original emphasis).
5. As developed by the human geographer and social scientist, Nigel Thrift, non-representational theory, or the theory of practices, takes as its leitmotif movement and, like actor-network theory, emphasises practices understood as material bodies of work. Thrift acknowledges the many affinities of non-repre-sentational theory with actor-network theory in Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect(2008, 110).
6. For each of 11 classrooms in eight schools and three major Australian states, two lessons, each lasting around 50 minutes, were videotaped 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 as seen from the front of the room. 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 learn-ing. Similarly, students were invited to make an account of lesson events, using as stimulus the video record from the teacher camera, with the indi-vidual students’ camera image inserted as a picture-in-picture image in one corner of the display.
7. The case described here was the first of the 11 case studies conducted. Sandra’s lessons were filmed just after the football grand final, in 2007.
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