Glimmers of Care: Attending to the Affective Everyday in Ninth‐Grade Literacy Classrooms

Abstract

In this qualitative study, the authors examined how care was enacted, understood, and valued by teachers and students in nine ninth‐grade English language arts classrooms. Following two yearlong cohorts of teachers, the authors explored sociopolitical interpretations of care, specifically focusing on how care was an everyday, political phenomenon in the classrooms. Drawing on observations, teacher and student surveys and interviews, and students’ multimodal compositions and artifacts, the authors analyzed glimmers of affect within and across classrooms. The authors framed their findings around two vignettes to illustrate how clusters of analytic glimmers revealed three dimensions of political, everyday care in the classrooms. First, care was shaped by the structures of space and pedagogy in classrooms, such as the requirements imposed on student composition. Second, the manipulation of the actual space of classrooms—the positioning of desks and bodies—shaped care. Finally, the materiality and modality of student production in classrooms highlighted both the platforms on which students demonstrated forms of care and the authoring decisions they made. The authors conclude with specific suggestions for using glimmers as a methodological approach in other affective studies and for designing classrooms that provide avenues for students to shape the enactments of care in classrooms.

Book Choice and the Affective Economy of Literacy

“…Our approach thus aligns with a growing pragmatic-contextual tradition in affect studies (Anderson, 2014; see also Ahmed, 2004b;Ngai, 2004), which is concerned with the ways affect mediates, and is mediated by, social contexts and practices. Such a view echoes recent work in literacy studies that likewise addresses the interplay of affect with the material, spatial, and textual ordering of reading and writing activities (e.g., Burnett & Merchant, 2020;Garcia et al, 2021;Lewis & Crampton, 2015;Nichols & Campano, 2017).…”

Performativity and Caring in Education: Toward an Ethic of Reimagination

“…In some ways, this represents an outsourcing of emotional labor from teachers onto students: teachers tried to expect students to feel and act in certain performatively advantageous ways as a classroom expectation (Hargreaves, 1998; Hochschild, 2012). However, teachers had different levels of facility with this sort of emotional management which led to some students’ feeling stifled or alienated in class (Garcia et al, 2020). Similarly, most of the teachers in this study genuinely wanted to care for students, but also saw maintaining caring relationships as a form of leverage.…”

“…In addition to offering teachers a productive way to navigate performative tensions, this practice highlights the considerable promise of meaningfully including students’ voices into understandings of success and growth. For example, recent research has highlighted the way that designing care experiences alongside students can help surface the seemingly (to adults) benign pressures and discomforts that students are exposed to in daily classroom life (Garcia et al, 2020). From a leadership perspective, Kennedy (2019) highlights that dialogic goal setting can form a model for teachers to meaningfully incorporate students’ own definitions of success.…”

Bilingual teachers and young children co-constructing affect and play in translanguaging read-alouds

“…Affect, as a form of care in learning, can be achieved through “pedagogical letting go” (Ehret and Rowsell, 2021, p. 204) of practices that dehumanize students in their literacy learning. As García et al (2021) point out, a pedagogical letting go means to break free of the normative ways of “doing schooling” that work to alienate students from their learning, and create new ways of creative expression as well as being and belonging in school. It also means departing from curricula that neglects the identities and lived experiences of minoritized students to center their ways of speaking, being and knowing (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018).…”