Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy

Assembling Theory and Practice

Kimberly Lenters, Mairi McDermott, Kimberly Lenters, Mairi McDermott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367136628
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429648236
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores the impact of sensation, affect, ethics, and place on literacy learning from early childhood through to adult education. Chapters bridge the divide between theory and practice to consider how contemporary teaching and learning can promote posthuman values and perspectives.

By offering a posthuman approach to literacy research and pedagogy, Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy re-works the theory-practice divide in literacy education, to emphasize the ways in which learning is an affective and embodied process merging in a particular environment. Written by literacy educators and international literacy researchers, this volume is divided into four sections focussing on: Moving with sensation and affect; becoming worldmakers with ethics and difference; relationships that matter in curriculum and place; before drawing together everything in a concise conclusion.

Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy is the perfect resource for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of literacy education and philosophy of education, as well as those seeking to explore the benefits of a posthumanism approach when conceptualising theory and practice in literacy education.

Plateau II
Becoming Worldmakers With Ethics and Difference

Mairi McDermott and Kim Lenters

The chapters in this plateau re-orient us to literacy as a worldmaking process through ethical entanglements with difference. We are interested in what kinds of world(s) are being made possible, for whom, and in what ways through our literacy practices/approaches/pedagogies. So, we ask, what are the histories and legacies of particular literacy pedagogies, and who do they serve and in what ways? How do our literacy emphases produce particular worlds and possibilities for becoming (for students and texts—inclusive of curriculum as text)?

Literacy education thus becomes a practice of relationality with others, to the unfolding assemblages of bodies, texts, histories, materials, policies that emerge moment by moment. This attention to the in-the-moment uncertainties, or “literacy desirings” (Kuby & Gutshall Rucker, 2016), shifts our emphases from what can become an over-determined focus on end products deemed easily “assess-able” through literacy benchmarks. These “literacy desirings” re-attune us towards the incommensurable processes that assemble literacy possibilities. What about the embodied-material literacy enactments that are beyond measure, indeed, beyond noticing? How might we open ourselves to being attuned to the different ways in which literacy manifests or takes shape, however fleetingly? Who or what do we need to pay attention to?

Posthuman Ethics

In this plateau, posthuman ethics “is also about affirming difference and the production of the new. Rather than limiting the future to what has already been done or what is already known, ethics involves opening up the potential for the unknown” (Hickey-Moody & Malins, 2007, p. 4). This is an ethics that is reminiscent of Kumashiro’s (2002) and Ahmed’s (2000) cautions against repetition; it requires that we open ourselves and our literacy practices to the yet-to-be rather than remaining solely in the what is. As we have noted throughout this volume, while we believe that tried-and-true literacy practices have much to offer, we are curious by what we haven’t yet tried; this curiosity takes courage. As Hargraves (2019) animates, “An ethical act is understood to emerge with the connections and productions which increase a body’s capacity for action” (p. 187, emphasis added). The courage to allow our curiosity and pedagogical wonder to propel us to act, to do things differently, to centre different ways of being, knowing, and doing literacy, is, in this way, an ethical act.

This approach to ethics in literacy education asks us to pause and draw out some of the conundrums frequently faced in literacy teaching and learning to ask how we might differently orient ourselves to the “problem,” as Aukerman and Jensen (this volume) do in their chapter. In some regards, ways of being-doing literacy education have become sedimented as “just the way things are done,” and as Aukerman and Jensen amplify, this causes us to miss the “hundred languages” or “a hundred, a thousand creative and communicative potentials” (Rinaldi, 2006, p. 175) of our students. This is ever-more important for those who have historically been dis-recognized as literate bodies through the disciplinary regimes of literacy instruction that focus on visible and recognizable outputs and postures of learning (Luke, 1992; Siegel, 2016).

The question of where knowledge resides is critical here, “Much contemporary schooling is contingent on reinforcing the notion of the teachers as she who ‘knows’ (as classroom manager, curriculum implementer, sociologist, even adolescent psychologist) and of students as knowable” (Gannon, 2009, p. 70). In a strange move, this location of knowledge(able subjects) objectifies students while simultaneously dis-recognizing the role of objects and materials in literacy education beyond how they can be leveraged for literacy learning but rather as agential entities within the literacy assemblage (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). So the question arises: How do we take up literacy as a way to “shift the boundaries of the familiar,” as an ethical encounter that holds open the potential for surprising realizations about “what [and who] we assume we know” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 7)?

Difference

Spring and Huddleston’s chapter (this volume) in this plateau takes up questions of identity work in literacy education in their re-reading of Rosenblatt’s reader response theory (RRT) through a posthumanist ethics. Whereas RRT often focuses on the connections readers make to the texts they read in identity work (thus centring sense-making agency in the human), posthuman ethics shifts attention to the effects of the text on differenciation. This repositions texts with thing power (Bennett, 2010) or agency to act upon the assemblage of identity. Texts matter. What texts do we bring in, and put on offer, for our youth to read? What texts are sanctioned or promoted in the curriculum or approved reading lists? Who are the authors? What are their positions? How do they interpellate, or call, students/readers into being? How might the texts offer alternative becomings, or for those who are more often misrepresented or essentialized in texts (see, for example, Morrison, 1992), how might the texts shift recognizability?

When thinking with difference, ethics, and relations with human and non-human others, we must recognize the histories of common usage haunting these concepts. In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2004) work, difference and the other are reconceptualized. Rather than conceptualizing difference as ways that a student (as a discrete entity) differs from another student or departs from a socially constructed idea of what that student should know or be able to do at a particular point in time (externalizing difference as out there in some other body), students, literacy practices, and texts are continually becoming something new, something different, through intra-activity in a literacy learning assemblage.

Indeed, while repetition of ways of being-doing-knowing literacy certainly make it seem as though things are naturally as they should be, that there is an essential identity to individuals (again human and non-human), we are urged to notice slippery moments when these boundaries seem to fall apart, when boundaries are (un)ruly. This is what Thiel and Pelling (this volume) take up in their chapter through their focus on space and boundaries as a constitutive force in shaping literacy possibilities. Like the other chapters in this plateau, they call for necessary transformations in our literacy relationships and as such a shift in worldmaking through recognition of the porosity of seemingly stable boundaries (among humans, nations, texts, objects, materials).

Worldmaking

Merchant and Devender-Kraft’s chapter (this volume) takes us into the role of literacy in (un)making boundaries for/of belonging through global flows of bodies (human, knowledge, capital, and so on) in so-called post-colonial times. Here literacy practices open spaces for making worlds of difference-and-belonging. How one comes into and through various school assemblages fraught with uncertainties around the language, culture, texts, and postures becomes a central ethical issue in this chapter. How these assemblages and the critical role of human-human relations as well as (con)text(ual) connections is amplified. This chapter offers a pedagogy of hope, a future-oriented belief that we can do better by our trans-national students that is grounded in the politics of the present, a notion that Nichols and O’Sullivan (this volume) call mutual flourishing in their chapter in this plateau. If “the world and its possibilities for becoming are remade with each moment” then “Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very mater of all being and becoming” (Barad, 2007, p. 396). Thus, being open to each literacy moment becomes an ethical practice of worldmaking for mutual flourishing.

Literacy as worldmaking through ethics and difference, then, asks about what comes to matter through our literacy practices and what is excluded, muted, or denied from mattering. In posthuman ethics, we have a responsibility to acknowledge the ways the world—our classrooms, our communities, our literacies, our identities, our texts—are always in-the-making through moment-by-moment assemblages of human and non-human others. We also have to engage critically with the habitual literacy practices that we repeat without question; we must ask what these ways of being and doing literacy do, what they open and what they foreclose? Furthermore, and of utmost importance is questioning who/what is included as agential in the becomings of these literacy practices. How might we unbound the fixed meanings embedded in and through our literacy approaches? As we have noted throughout the volume, we believe this critical engagement ought to be generative rather than dismissive; perhaps our tried-and-true practices do hit the mark? How might we allow ourselves to be open to the different literacy possibilities both within what we already do as well as beyond that?

How do we retune ourselves to the not-yet-imagined/surfaced within literacy? What role has literacy played in disciplining bodies (of students, of communities, of knowledge, of text)? How might we re-orient ourselves to what “counts” as recognizable literacy? Who or what fits in our conceptualizations of literacy?

References

Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London, UK: Routledge.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political economy of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987/2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (originally published as Mille Plateuaux, volume 2 of Capitalisme et schizophrenie. Paris, France: Minuit, 1987).

Hargraves, V. (2019). The posthuman condition of ethics in early childhood literacy: Order-in(g)be(e)ing literacy. In C. R. Kuby, K. Spector, & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education: Knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 187–200). New York, NY: Routledge.

Hickey-Moody, A., & Malins, P. (2007). Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and four movements in social thought. In A. Hickey-Moody & P. Malins (Eds.), Deleuzian encounters: Studies in contemporary social issues (pp. 1–24). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gannon, S. (2009). Difference as ethical encounter. In B. Davies & S. Gannon (Eds.), Pedagogical encounters (pp. 69–88). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Kuby, C. R., & Gutshall Rucker, T. (2016). Go be a writer! Expanding curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kumashiro, K. (2002). Against repetition: Addressing resistance to anti-oppressive change in the practices of learning, teaching, supervising, and researching. Harvard Educational Review, 72 (1), 67–92.

Luke, A. (1992). The body literate: Discourse and inscription in early literacy training. Linguistics and Education, 4, 107–129.

Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the dark: Whiteness and the literary imagination. New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. London, UK: Routledge.

Siegel, M. (2016). Inscription, erasure, embodiment: Literacy research and bodies of knowledge. In G. Enriquez, E. Johnson, S. Kontovourki, & C. A. Mallozzi (Eds.), Literacies, learning, and the body: Putting theory and research into pedagogical practice (pp. 20–38). New York, NY: Routledge.

5
What Nose Hill Taught Us About Boundary-Making, Boundary-Knowing, and Boundary-Becoming

Jaye Johnson Thiel and Melody Pelling

As I (Jaye) stood at the bottom of Nose Hill (Figure 7), my body began to feel anxious. Eyeing the walking path upward to where the earth meets the sky, the road to the top seemed endless. “I’ll never make it,” I thought to myself as my mind quickly provided a list of all the possible physical limitations standing in my way. At some point, this list materialized as spoken words to Melody (my writing partner for this project), “WHEW! That is a big climb,” to which she replied in agreement.

Melody had shared with me that she often walks Nose Hill after her long days as a Canadian school administrator. Power walks even. So, I knew she was familiar with the space and her body knew how to engage with the bodies around her in ways that felt very foreign to me. As an American academic who does not power walk anything, I started to feel very nervous about the climb we were about to embark on together. But being who I am, I did not want to be too fearful. I did not want to be too vulnerable. I did not want to be too defeatist. Taking a deep breath, I walked forward.

I knew in the first few yards or meters that I would lose the group, as they seemed to be jaunting upward at a pace of conquest, while I, on the other hand, felt Nose Hill might conquer me. I shared with Melody that I would need to walk very slowly, that I understood if she wanted to go ahead. I did not want to hold her up. (All things women seem to learn to do as to not be a bother to the world around them.) Melody assured me that a slow pace was fine and that she planned to stick with me the entire way.

As we travelled upward, the group melted into the horizon—gone as sunsets often do—lovely, bright, becoming one with the horizon, and then suddenly there is no trace that one was on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword—The Gradual Instant
• Preface
• Introducing Affect, Embodiment, and Place in Critical Literacy
• ORIENTING MAP I Mapping Posthuman Concepts
• PLATEAU I Moving With Sensation and Affect
• ORIENTING MAP II Opening Minds, Eyes, Ears, and Doors: Emergent Learning Opportunities for Literacy Educators Weaving Theory in Everyday Classrooms
• PLATEAU II Becoming Worldmakers With Ethics and Difference
• ORIENTING MAP III Knowing/Be(com)ing/Doing Literacies: (Re)Thinking Theory-Practice With a Personal Narrative Game Board
• PLATEAU III Relationships That Matter in Curriculum and Place
• PLATEAU IV (In)Conclusions
• ORIENTING MAP IV Why Theory? Thinking, Being, Doing Literacy With Posthumanism
• Index