Teaching as invasion: emotions, boundaries and entanglements

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to engage nine women English teachers in exploring their personal memories centered around the perception of their raced, classed and gendered teacher bodies, and led them to conceptualize teaching as invasion.

Design/methodology/approach

The process of collective memory work (CMW), a qualitative feminist research method, was used to structure collaborative sessions for the nine women English teachers. In these sessions, the group took up the CMW process as the memories were written, read, analyzed and theorized together.

Findings

The analyses of two memories from our group's work builds understanding of how the use of new materialism and a conceptualization of emotions as social, collective and agentic, can expand the understanding of the teacher bodies and disrupt normalizing narratives of teaching and learning. The post-humanist concept of intra-action leads one to better understand the boundaries in the teacher – student relationships that is built/invaded, and to see the ways materials, humans, emotions and discourses are entangled in the teaching encounters.

Originality/value

This study demonstrates how sustained and collective research methodologies like CMW can open space for teachers to more fully explore their identities, encounters and relationships. Further, unpacking everyday classroom moments (through the framework of literacy-as-event) can yield deep and critical understanding of how bodies, emotions and non-human objects all become entangled when teaching becomes an act of invasion.

Citation

Stutelberg, E.B. (2020), "Teaching as invasion: emotions, boundaries and entanglements", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 479-491. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-11-2019-0144