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Introduction

Set within the context of the cultural logic of neo-liberalism (Blackman et al. 2008) and its heightened individualism, and sceptical about current manifestations of the discourse of the centrality of the teacher (Larsen 2010), whereby teachers are taken to be the difference with respect to student outcomes (Mills and Gale 2011), this chapter investigates the role of embodiment and affect 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 processes, but that its efficacy also lies in attending to the affective dimension of teaching and learning’ (Lovat 2010, p. 491). Bringing together concepts from actor-network theory (Latour 2005; Law 2009) and from affect theory that invokes the work of Deleuze (Clough and Halley 2007; Cole 2012; Massumi 1996; Thrift 2008), I make an argument about the critical contribution of affects, as socio-material practices, to teaching and learning and the value of investigating affectivity in a way that breaks with subject-centredness and its privilege of the human/individual. In so doing, I join with other researchers who are committed to correcting a cognitivist bias in education (Johnson 2005; Lenz Taguchi 2011; Saito 2010; Zembylas 2007a) and understanding affects as processes discharged through bodies, objects and spaces (Gregg 2010; Navaro-Yashin 2009; Williams 2010).

Regarding the latter, this understanding can be conceived as post- or better perhaps, more-than-humanistic. Exploring the relationships between what are still commonly thought of as separate entities which interact, for example, ‘subject content and academic processes’ and ‘the affective dimension’ (see again Lovat 2010, p. 491), I highlight the intricate entanglement of affect and cognition. As Thrift (2008, p. 175, original emphasis) has it, ‘affect is understood as a form of thinking’. I draw attention to aspects of classroom and professional practice that are occluded in ‘official’Footnote 1 accounts of this practice, given the systemic concerns in education currently with metrics, measures and outcomes, and consider the circumstances of this neglect. I ask: does it occur because these aspects ‘are invisible or remain below the threshold of the kind of knowing we are familiar with or pay attention to?’ (Venn 2010, p. 134). And, what/who might carry the cost of these occlusions?

The concept of the assemblage forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is akin to the notion of actor-network in actor-network theory, and directs attention to the many, diverse and contesting actors, agencies and practices through which human subjects and material objects take form. ‘Assemblage’ is ‘one of the major motifs in Deleuzian philosophy’ (Zembylas 2007b, p. 24), with bodies being examples of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call assemblages (Buchanan 1997). Without any organising centre, ‘assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements that may be human and non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural’ (Anderson and McFarlane 2011, p. 124). In an actor-network theory rendering, they can be considered sociomaterial assemblages (Fenwick and Landri 2012). Larsen (2010, p. 209) suggests that ‘we might rethink our fixation with the central importance of the teacher, and re-centre our attention to address broader societal contexts within which schools are located, and the complex, messy and contextualised nature of teachers’ work. Neglecting to do so will continue to prove troubling for teachers and their work, and for broader educational reform efforts’. Deploying a sociomaterial assemblage approach affords consideration of ‘the complex, messy and contextualised’, specifically, affective processes and relations, and challenges the idea of teacher as inevitably centre-stage, inviting attention to other actors and agencies. These processes and relations are inexorably embodied where embodiment is taken to be ‘a linked, hybrid field of flesh and accompanying objects, rather than a series of individual bodies, intersubjectively linked’ (Thrift 2008, p. 276). Embodiment is inescapably material.

Set within the emerging field of sociomaterial studies (Fenwick 2012; Fenwick and Landri 2012; Fenwick and Nerland 2014; Mulcahy 2012; Sorensen 2009; see also a special issue of the journal, Pedagogy, Culture & Society on ‘Materialities, Textures and Pedagogies’, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2012),Footnote 2 embodiment and affect provide a platform for rethinking what it means to be and practise as a teacher and, by extension, to be and practise as a learner in school classrooms and beyond. In giving attention to them, along with bodies – human and otherwise – I seek to extend current conceptualisations of teaching as a site of professional practice as well as contribute to the field of practice theory and philosophy (Green 2009; Hager et al. 2012; Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki et al. 2001) by way of bringing a sociomaterial sensibility to extant understandings of this body of work.

This chapter is organized broadly in two parts. First, I examine what the theoretical literature says about bodies and affects, drawing principally from the work of Massumi, Deleuze and Latour. I attend most particularly to what bodies and affects make possible – what they do – and the kind of practice thinking that informs this doing. Joining with Johnson (2005, p. 132, original emphasis) in the view that educational research has not done enough application of these theories of the body and affect to bodies of data, second, I use a selection of data fragments drawn from video case-studies conducted as part of an Australian Research Council project on (i) the relationship between professional teaching standards and teacher professional learning,Footnote 3 and (ii) the development of a specific set of professional standards, standards for teaching school geography. Empirically, I address the issue of the import of affective encounters in classrooms and beyond for teaching and learning and attend to pedagogic moments as sociomaterial practices of assembly, which are often mundane, everyday, and seemingly trivial, yet they move and affect teachers and learners. Subsequent to this section, I discuss the critical contribution of affect in classrooms and beyond and draw out the implications for (professional) education of attending to bodies and affects and deploying a sociomaterial assemblage approach to teaching practice and practice theory.

Terms of Engagement: Affect and Bodies

We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, … to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, … to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 257).

In giving attention to the hard to name and discuss dynamics of affect and embodiment in teaching, I take my lead from Latour (2004) who has ‘linked the problem of affect to a reformulation of bodies as processes rather than entities’ (Blackman and Venn 2010, p. 9). In addressing the question ‘What can a body do?’, Latour (2004) claims that bodies should be defined by their capacities to affect and be (open to being) affected. Thus, bodily affectivity in teaching, or, in the example that Latour works, in training (here, the training of ‘noses’ for the perfume industry), is ‘teaching to be affected’: rendering learners to be affected, with persons (teachers, trainers) and objects (odour kits) doing the rendering. In this schema, affect is outside the confines of a bounded, singular and distinctly human body (Blackman and Venn 2010, pp. 21–23). The focus on enactment, ‘What can a body do?’, ‘shifts attention away from the idea of singular pre-existing entities or objects to the ways in which practices alter, transform, intervene and shape objects’ (Blackman 2010, p. 170). Learning to be affected is embodied learning, with both the learner and the learning being in a process of becoming. The learner becomes otherwise; as Latour (2004, p. 225) tells it, the trainee ‘learnt to have a nose’, to ‘be a nose’, having learnt to be affected by bodies of different kinds (eg. human bodies, odour kits).

The term affect, writes Thrift (2008, p. 116), ‘is not simply emotion, nor is it reducible to the affections or perceptions of an individual subject’. Invoking Deleuze (1995, p. 137), Thrift (ibid.) continues: ‘affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those who live through them (they become other)’. In other words, they go beyond ‘the inner world or interiority of the human subject, coined “subjectivity”’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, p. 12). They are intensities, sensations or energies that can be discharged through objects and spaces, ‘making it possible to read many other things, such as space and the environment, as affective’ (ibid.). They are ‘encounters with other bodies (semiotically) that infect all of experience so that one affects and is affected by other bodies’ (Zembylas 2007a, p. xxx, original emphasis).

As the empirical material that is worked later in the chapter attempts to show, these bodies comprise not only individual human bodies but also bodies of water and bodies of knowledge. Here, bodies and affect are relational terms rather than predominantly contained, individual and private:

Bodies of all sorts are in constant relation with other bodies. Some of these relations are compatible and give rise to joyful affects that may in turn increase the intensive capacity of a body; others are incompatible relations that give rise to sad or debilitating affects, which at their worst may entirely destroy a body’s integrity (Gatens 2000, p. 64).

As MacLure (2010, p. 284) explains, following Massumi (2002b), affect in the Deleuzian sense:

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 “intersubjective” 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 (Massumi 2002b).

And, one might add, material: it ‘registers on the body’; it ‘“affects” bodies’. Indeed, for Bennett (2010, p. xiii), affect equates with materiality.

Furthermore, affect is political in the sense that ‘power is an inextricable aspect of how bodies come together, move, and dwell’ (Zembylas 2007a, p. xiv). Zembylas (ibid., p. 105, original emphasis) continues, ‘affects are political manifestations of various kinds of resistances and transformations in educational environments. Unravelling the political aspects of affects … creates possibilities for enriching our perspectives about the dynamics of affective relations in the political landscape of the classroom’. More broadly, and as Ringrose (2010, p. 48) has it, the importance of a focus on affect and embodiment lies in ‘thinking about issues of power, and possibilities for understanding social and subjective change’.

Drawing primarily on Spinoza, Massumi (1996) frames affect as both a force and a capacity (Spinoza’s affectus and affectio); as such, it can be ‘harnessed’ to unsettle established power relations and create transformative effects. These affective dimensions are cut through with relations of power; they can, for example, have affinity with neo-liberal discourses and agendas that seek to uphold the centrality of the teacher with respect to achieving desired student and schooling outcomes, or indeed, not. They can ‘flip’ these discourses over:

Affect is like our human gravitational field, and what we call our freedom are its relational flips. Freedom is not about escaping or breaking constraints. It’s about flipping them over into degrees of freedom. … You can’t just step out of gender identity. But just maybe you can take steps to encourage gender to flip. That can’t be an individual undertaking. … It’s a relational undertaking. You’re not acting on yourself or other individuals separately. You’re acting on them together … It’s a pragmatic politics of the in-between. It’s an abductive politics that has to operate on the level of affect (Massumi 2002a, p. 14).

Along with other sources such as Spinoza, James and Whitehead, Deleuze and Latour draw on the micro-sociological tradition of Gabriel Tarde who did not differentiate social from biological, material or psychological phenomena but rather drew out relations between them. In so doing, Tarde passes for ‘an early ancestor’ of actor-network theory (Latour 2002, 2005, p. 15). As Barry and Thrift (2007, p. 514) posit: ‘Tarde’s sociology is, above all, a sociology of relations. For Tarde, the elementary social acts were the relations which led to modifications in states of consciousness’, such as affective and educative relations. As for Deleuze, these relations are thought in terms of relations ‘in’ something, not ‘to’ something.

Sociomaterial Approaches to Practice: Telling Stories About How Relations Assemble

Both Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and Latour (2004) address the question of what bodies can do. Bodies are what they do, and as stated in the introduction to this chapter, are examples of assemblages. The notion of assemblage ‘links directly to a practice, to assemble’ (Li 2007, p. 264), affording a ‘focus not on what affects or bodies mean but on what they do: what connections they do (or do not) permit’ (Zembylas 2007b, p. 28, original emphasis). Actor-network theory constitutes itself as/in/for practice. As one of its originators, John Law (2007, p. 145), explains: ‘[I]t is the practices (including the people) that come first. It is their materiality, their embodiment, their diurnal and organizational periodicities, their architectural forms, that are central. And these practices are often pretty obdurate. In this way of thinking, practices make the world’. Positing the idea that ANT is not a theory, practice theory or otherwise, Law (2009) states that it is a diverse set of empirical practices with a sensibility to materiality, process, uncertainty and specificity, and that it is seriously misunderstood if it is treated as a theory separable from those practices. ‘[I]t tells stories about “how” relations assemble or don’t’ (ibid., p. 141). Central to actor-network theory is the notion of performativity. In line with non-representational theory (Thrift 2008), which is ‘based upon valuing practices in and for themselves’ (ibid., p. 110), and conceivably a variant of practice theory and philosophy, actor network theorists use the term performativity to accent practice – to indicate that reality is brought into being – is enacted, fashioned, or done. It does not exist outside its ‘doing’ in various and different practices. The assumption is made that nothing has reality, or form, outside its performance in webs of relations, with performances being defined as ‘material processes, practices, which take place day by day and minute by minute’ (Law and Singleton 2000, p. 775).

It is widely acknowledged that theorists of science and technology, such as Rouse and Pickering and, I suggest, Latour, Law and Mol, practise a type of practice theory. ‘Today, practice theorists of many stripes acknowledge that nonhuman entities help constitute human sociality. Practices, as indicated, are generally construed as materially mediated nexuses of activity’ (Schatzki 2001, p. 20, original emphasis). Sociomaterial approaches to practice, most particularly those influenced by actor-network theory, share concepts with practice theory in its more classical form (see for example, Reckwitz 2002; Schatzki 2001). However, as the principal proponent of ‘classical’ practice theory, Theodore Schatzki (2001, p. 20), acknowledges: ‘most practice theorists continue to focus on the human. … For these humanist theorists, practices are arrays of activity, and the activities involved are those of humans’. Thus, while ‘practice theory … joins a variety of “materialist” approaches in highlighting how bundled activities interweave with ordered constellations of nonhuman entities’ (ibid., p. 12), it maintains a residual humanism (Schatzki 2002). In Schatzki’s more recent work, where attention is given to the concept of practice-arrangement nexuses (Schatzki 2010) and practice-arrangement bundles (Schatzki 2013), an alignment of practice theory with ANT-inflected, sociomaterial approaches to understanding practice appears to be achieved, albeit with caveats attached: ‘[W]hereas accounts inspired by my ontology will resemble actor-network inspired accounts insofar as the concept of arrangements resembles that of networks, they will diverge from these accounts, among other things, in their constant attention to practices and to relations between practices and arrangements’ (Schatzki 2010, p. 145). A distinction is drawn between ‘theories of arrangements’ (network theory, assemblage theory) and ‘practice theories’ (Schatzki 2002). The empirical research reported here is set within or, better perhaps, moves between, ‘theories of arrangements’ and ‘practice theories’. ‘Practices and arrangements are co-constitutive’ (Schatzki 2010, p. 140). Storying how teaching and learning relations assemble is studying these practices.

The Project in Question: Data and Methods

The project described here was concerned to study what ‘accomplished’ Geography teaching is by documenting what Geography teachers, who are deemed accomplished, do. Data were sourced from teachers and students via video-recordings of accomplished 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 reputation 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 the flow of teacher action and embodied judgement, the approach adopted used technically complex methods for video-recording classroomsFootnote 4 and supplemented the recordings with post-lesson video-stimulated interviews with students and the teacher. Pre-lesson interviews with each teacher were also conducted. Altogether, eleven case-studies (22 lessons) were undertaken in eight schools (government and non-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 min. The data fragments discussed below concern two of these case-studies. Set within a large, metropolitan, government school and a medium size, rural, non-government school, the classes comprise a Year 9 Geography class and a Year 8 Geography class. Taking affective encounters as the locus for analysis, and the idea of bodies as assemblages as given, I ask: what can bodies do? and explore issues of power and identity (becoming), through this doing. Names of teachers and students have been altered for reasons of confidentiality.

Affective Encounters: Doing Bodies in Classrooms and Beyond

Simon’s Story: ‘I Work from Their Personal Geographies’

Teaching in a large, co-educational government school in the Melbourne metropolitan area, Simon has just commenced a topic on coasts, towards preparing his Year 9 Geography class for a coastal fieldwork trip to Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Fieldwork can be considered a ‘signature’ form of teaching and learning in school Geography and, as Simon describes in the pre-lesson interview, is something that the Year 9’s are familiar with: ‘This is our first really extended external fieldwork and I want to work with something that they are familiar with. So the coast. … And, as I explain in class, I work from their personal geographies’. Thus, when conducting the lesson prior to the fieldwork trip, Simon encourages the students to ‘think about your route from home to school’, and gives his own example: ‘For my route, from Ashburton to here, it’s residential, leafy avenues, ’cos I drive through them all the time, relatively well off, I’m making a judgement, well-cared for, yeah, they look after their garden, they mow it, I see them out there each time …’. He appears to well understand that people think through embodied experiences and practices in such a way that the body’s significance in teaching, and for learning a practice,Footnote 5 is made plain.

The bodily basis of Simon’s teaching is evident in these reports given at interview:

That’s why I, every once in a while, I said [in the lesson]: ‘are you with it?’ You know, and you look around, you’re not looking for all those who are saying ‘yes’, you’re looking for those who are going ‘hang on, no, not quite’, you know, and that’s an unwritten thing. I’ve never thought about it [before] but yeah, you ignore all the ones that say ‘yes’. You are looking for the two or three who say ‘no’ and you say: ‘I’ll wait for them’.

I suppose what’s unwritten in the fieldwork … too is that you’ve got to have done it yourself, beforehand. The timing of it, between stops, how long you’ve got there, what you are likely to see, what changes, … I went down a few weeks ago along the coast … I’m re-looking at ‘oh yeah, that’s changed, I can see … .’. With my senior fieldwork, I go up the weekend before, just to see the site, see what’s going on, access, camping, facilities, and that. There’s all this background stuff.

In fieldwork, teaching presents as a sociomaterial practice in which teachers, learners, bodies, coasts, texts and technologies all actively play a part, as illustrated in this collage of images taken from the video-record of the coastal fieldwork trip (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Year 9 Geography students on a fieldwork trip: learning to be affected

Full size image

Students appreciate learning through a ‘hands-on’ approach. I propose that they are ‘learning to be affected’ (Latour 2004) by the natural environment and the relaxed relations that can be achieved outside classrooms, as implied in the images above, and as reported by the students at interview upon their completion of the coastal field trip:

At one point … we put red food dye in the water and see (sic) how the waves would carry it out and then it pushed it forward, pulled it back and then it pushed it forward up the sea. And then we measured how far it moved in such time.

This [coastal field trip] was more seeing; my other [geography] excursion was more hands-on, feeling what the type of soil was.

I find it [field trips] much more useful because you’ve got something to look at. Not just, you know, when you are writing [things] down, you are trying to think about what it would be like. This is what it is like. So it’s really good.

While more muted than in Simone’s story below, affect locates in the midst of things such as ‘put[ting] red food dye in the water and see[ing] how the waves would carry it out’ and feeling soil for its type. It can be inferred that both sea and soil are bodies with affective capacities beyond the transmission of information: ‘This is what it is like. So it’s really good’. In putting bodies back into learning,Footnote 6 a more-than-representational experience of learning, an experience outside of language, can be valorized in education (Ellsworth 2005, p. 29; see also Green 2009, p. 50).

The character of teaching in a field setting is similarly ‘hands-on’, as Simon demonstrates when explaining one of the exercises that the students will be asked to take part in when on their way to the coast:

One of the tasks that we do a couple of times [on fieldwork] is the tunnel vision. Tunnel vision is … it’s actually the opposite. We live in a world, if you think about it, we go around the world walking round like this [head down, Simon’s hands are held to his face, narrowing his vision] and you only see what’s directly in front of you, where you’re heading from A to B and you miss all the detail. In fieldwork, we walk like this [arms outstretched wide, head up] and we see everything. And we see the links between [everything]. It’s the same thing when we do a tunnel vision; we’ll be going down [to the coast] and we’ll be doing the tunnel vision in the bus. So for a period of time in the bus, at points, we’ll be observing what’s taking place on the land either side of us. Right? So that’s what a tunnel vision exercise is. … Your route to school is the tunnel vision you do everyday and never really think about. It’s your personal geography; your map of your route to the school.

Using his body as a pedagogic resource, Simon enacts a process which he expects his students to enact in turn, towards them being affected by what they will see as they take the bus to the coast. Simon is teaching learners to be affected by the forthcoming fieldtrip by directing attention to how they might move their bodies, undertake embodied tasks (tunnel vision), and engage in embodied encounters with places and processes (eg. being bussed), all of which have the potential, perhaps, to catch them unawares and transform their learning.

Simone’s Story: ‘I Just Couldn’t Come Today and Not Talk About This’

In this data fragment, we meet Simone who is engaged in teaching a Year 8 Geography class in a Victorian rural private school. Simone’s stated intention in the lesson is to build knowledge about the workings of river processes in preparation for a forthcoming field trip to a river. However, five or so minutes into the lesson, Simone stops and says: ‘Before I start though … something pretty big has happened and I couldn’t deny not talking about it today’. Showing a digital image of Burma (see Fig. 7.2), 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 thus:

Fig. 7.2
figure 2

Cyclone Nargus: an affective encounter

Full size image

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.

Affected by the scale of the event and the fact that it has occurred in a poor country (‘You live in Burma … you’re a farmer and you don’t have much money’), Simone’s evident desire to talk about it sparks a reaction among the members of the class who respond enthusiastically to the questions posed and create, what can be called, an affective encounter:

Teacher::

The cyclone’s gone, are you still in danger?

Student::

Yes.

Teacher::

From what?

Student::

Disease.

Teacher::

Why?

Student::

Ah ’cause of sewage. Dead bodies.

Teacher::

Sewage, dead bodies.

Student::

’Cause all the dead bodies and stuff would bring disease and there’s no immunisation.

The ‘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, p. 282) – frissons of energy and possibly anxiety and fear: ‘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?’. The intensities of engagement with Cyclone Nargis, as suggested in Simone’s gestural and body work, and the activity of quick-fire question and answer that she and her students undertake, I propose, serve to compose the body of the Year 8 class as a collective. As Cole (2012, pp. 2–4) has it, educational affect ‘makes things happen. … If the teacher has researched his or her subject well, and speaks with passion and sincerity, these affects will permeate the atmosphere of the class, the learning context and the subsequent educational practice’. Exchanging actions and affects, learning is set in motion in ways I speculate that the intended curriculum of ‘looking at river landforms and the way rivers work in erosion, deposition and transportation’ cannot quite match or command.

This is so for both students and the teacher. Simone happened to say 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. That was a key event.

She then added, seemingly paradoxically: ‘Talking about the cyclone, that was unexpected for me. I, I, that was just something, I just thought this morning, I’ve got to talk about this’. While styling the decision to talk about the cyclone as an epistemic one – ‘I added that … because one of the things I have been talking to them about is current events in geography’ – something more appears to be playing out in these data. 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 deny not talking about it today’, are markers of a struggle of some kind. There is a tension running through the data around keeping the focus on the topic of the day – ‘Not to do with rivers ok’; ‘I know this is not quite to do with rivers’ – and on real-world events: ‘[B]ut I just can’t ignore this at the moment’.

One reading of this tension can be made in terms of the process pedagogy of real-world events being less outcomes-oriented than contemporary curriculum demands. As Sandvik (2012, p. 200) comments, ‘Western policy makers and educational programme advocators seem to be intensifying their praise of predictable learning outcomes and of the virtues and values of accountable pedagogical command and control’, rather than of a pedagogic assemblage where all entities (teachers, students, world events, digital images, desires …) are emerging parts. Following Deleuze, the immanent features of pedagogic processes are dis-privileged. In struggling to talk about the cyclone, I suggest that Simone is taking a step towards challenging the power of curriculum normalisation and experimenting with new ways of becoming a Geography teacher-subject. The affective charge of the event that she ‘just can’t ignore’ might be thought an unruly teaching relation that can be used to reassemble, at least momentarily, the established, representational approach to teaching school Geography.

Body Matters: Affect in Classrooms and Beyond

Analysing affective encounters as data in relation to bodies and other material processes opens a space for materiality in educational research and invites breaking with the ultimately disenfranchising ideas of the central importance of the teacher (Larsen 2010) and of the teacher as cogito. The teacher can be thought with regard to his/her body, rather than as a ‘classical’ subject, a person with an attached identity/‘mind’? Researching from the body, the material has ‘a more central part in our research data as doings in practice’ (Rossholt 2012, p. 332). It affords tracing processes that are often momentary yet consequential for education, such as the affect populating the situation of the cyclone, which is critical to Simone becoming other than a traditional Geography teacher, or better, both a traditional Geography teacher and a Geography teacher who teaches otherwise – a teacher who operates in a zone of indetermination, a zone of affect (Deleuze 1994). It has the advantage of attending to the range of agencies and responsibilities involved in these complex pedagogic practices and of asking about the nature of what passes between bodies and other processes and relations. The analysis does not privilege ‘the actions of individuals in molar (institutional) identity categories’ (Albrecht-Crane and Slack 2007, p. 106), such as the present-day policy emphasis on the identity category of the quality teacher. The focus is placed squarely on movement, process and practice, not on who determines whom and what and how (Seyfert 2012). As it is on collective responsibility. Among other things, the where of teaching and learning (classroom and field) and the what of teaching and learning (the espoused curriculum, or not) must be taken into account.

Affective and embodied relations are not the exclusive concern of the teacher. They are embedded in distributed, heterogeneous and specific practices (e.g. field trips, undertaking tunnel-vision tasks, referencing happenings around the world), so responsibilities for recognising their worth and creating conditions for their further growth and development should be similarly distributed and heterogeneous. Among others, teacher education has a role to play. Teachers are far from being lone actors in relation to conditions that create quality teaching. Other social and material actors and agencies come into play. As Larsen (2010, p. 214) notes, the discourse of the centrality of the teacher (and, one might add, a particular type of teacher – a disembodied one) has contributed to the production of a range of teacher policies that emphasise notions such as quality, accountability and performance. Reflecting a technical-rational approach to policy-making, this discourse directs attention to teachers as singularities and downplays the various other assemblages in which they are caught up. ‘Contemporary teacher policy reforms are part of a broader neo-liberal business model educational reform agenda, which includes the development of school management systems, the privatisation of schools, cutbacks to educational funding, the introduction of nationally prescribed curricula, standardised student testing and the establishment of school league tables’ (ibid., p. 215).

While acknowledging that other readings of the empirical material might be made, and other case-stories told, the empirical analyses here stress agency, process and emergence over the kind of completed order implied in notions of quality teaching and the quality teacher. Teaching presents as a complex and always contingent process of ongoing construction or, a more suitable metaphor, assembly. Exploring affectivity in classrooms and beyond affords a strong sense of the shifting, embodied and emotional terrain of teaching: ‘I just couldn’t come today and not talk about this’. Teachers cross this terrain with students who appreciate being caught up in a ‘passionate pedagogy that encourages a teacher to express her or his emotions using a particular vocabulary and performance’ (Zembylas 2003, p. 123). As one of Simone’s students comments at interview: ‘[I like] things like the casual talks, like about things, not just the topic that we are learning, things that happen on the actual news and the happenings around the world’. Taking the ‘affective turn’ in education challenges us to better recognise the interweaving of cognition, emotion and action in learning settings while forging new directions for curriculum and pedagogies wherein the roles of bodies and other material processes and their affective potential are acknowledged and embraced.

Rather than something ‘personal’ – bringing intrinsic qualities or potentialities to bear, as an individualised psychological view of self has it – teacher affect is constituted in assemblages of practice and the politics that attach to this practice. For example, when Sandra, another teacher who was video-recorded as part of a further case-study, is described by one of her students as ‘like a good teacher, laid back, like she’s serious in a way but she can have a joke’, the contrast drawn between being serious and having a joke implies the positive contribution that affect can make to teaching and classroom learning. Arguably, it also implies the epistemic gravitas of schooling, with its academic curriculum, and the transgressive possibility that affects potentially produce. Critique here has little to do with negating the status quo – the dominance achieved in schooling systems of academic curriculum and of conceptions of learning as a cognitive activity (Watkins 2010, pp. 279–280); rather, it ‘consists of the possibility to discern moments of escape from territorializations in a profoundly positive way’ (Albrecht-Crane and Slack 2007, p. 107). Affect can work to open classroom spaces to otherness and difference such as having a joke, play and fun; ‘to release that which lives’ (ibid.). ‘In contact with what’s outside the construct of the classroom, as a flow meeting other flows … as tearing the classroom into pieces, getting it to interact with other things’ (ibid.), it is this release that we get a glimpse of in the practices presented in the data fragments above, and which constitutes the chief contribution of affect to education. Affect can put into effect the transformative potential of education. Bodies do matter.