Teaching Bodies: Affects in the Classroom

Abstract

This article reintroduces notions of the experiential, lived body as crucial for teaching. It critiques some recent moves within women’s studies, and cultural studies more generally, to use ‘theory’ as a way of abstracting bodies from the classroom. Using the work of Silvan Tomkins on affects, and Deleuzian notions of the body, it argues for a more comprehensive account of the affects, politics and practices of pedagogy.

Teaching Diversity — Im/Possible Pedagogy

“…In particular, bell hooks (2003) raises the complex issues of desire and power in teaching, and highlights the limits of pedagogies only fixated on signification and meaning. Similarly, the significance of 'embodied affects' in engaging student subjectivities for critical and feminist pedagogy is a key concern for Probyn (2004). Her discussion notes the authority of the work of Deleuze & Guattari (1987) in this area, especially as they offer alternative conceptions of 'affect' which problematize the representational logic of identity and difference.…”

“…Notably, a persistent criticism against the conceptually driven work of critical pedagogy has been its lack of application to the actual 'messy realities' of teaching -see especially Buckingham (1996) and O'Shea (1998). Even the theorist Elspeth Probyn (2004) has recently complained about the difficulty of putting into practice some of the abstruse concepts of radical pedagogies. The praxis of critical pedagogy continues to be challenged by the 'gap' between theory and classroom practice (Williamson, 1981-82), which is further compounded when confronted by the antagonisms of difference in an age of multicultural globalization.…”

On the Transgressive Possibilities of Physical Pedagogic Practices

“…It is a learning culture that can involve immersive experiences (reading/writing/reflecting/sharing ideas and insights), challenge (stretching thinking, embodying risk to voice ideas, listening to different perspectives), and different modes of learning across different time-space configurations (face to face, digitally mediated, embodied fieldwork -sensing, writing/speaking). For us, this sits at the heart of technoslowness, and potentially offers an important space for questioning normalized modes of teaching and student passivity and an embodied affective, creative and critical teaching practice that delivers more of the 'goose bump' moments (Probyn, 2004) that 'move' students and thus ourselves to know in different ways. These new influential directions could thereby push us to understand the teaching-learning (and indeed the assessment of understanding) relation as embodied, the renegotiation of teaching subject positions that exist beyond the hierarchical form of the lecture and assessment beyond the linearity of question setting and answering (within the dynamics of the consumer oriented education market), and the tensions inherent within how we understand the inter-subjective experience of becoming different students-teachers.…”

Líneas pedagógicas para una Educación Corporal

“…Aunque a lo largo de la historia hay una preponderancia por las ideas del cuerpo, desde el siglo XX hay una pluralidad en las concepciones de "cuerpo": cuerpo/ alma, cuerpo/mente, cuerpo/máquina, cuerpo/órgano, cuerpo/objeto, cuerpo/sujeto, cuerpo/persona, entre otros. En este contexto, se encuentran estudios sobre las pedagogías performativas en escenarios escolarizados (PERRY; MEDINA, 2011), pedagogías del cuerpo simbólico (PLANELLA, 2005;EDDY, 2006;GARRETT;WRENCH, 2012;GARCÍA, 2013;GALLO, 2014;CASTRO, 2014); pedagogías y experiencias corporales HUNTLY, 2013;JONES, 2013;BENZER, 2012); pedagogías del cuerpo en procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje PENNEY, 2013;HOPWOOD;PAULSON, 2012;PROBYN, 2004;HUGHES-DECATUR, 2011) y pedagogía de las afecciones (FARINA, 2013) que problematizan la educación técnica del cuerpo, el cuerpo-frankestein, discuten con el disciplinamiento de los cuerpos, ponen el cuerpo como categoría perceptiva, se ocupan de lo sensible, de prácticas corporales estéticas, de experiencias que tienen su sustrato en la propia corporalidad, se pone el cuerpo en el lugar del aprendizaje y se lo constituye en una instancia fundamental para la educación.…”