Teaching as invasion: emotions, boundaries and entanglements
English Teaching: Practice & Critique
ISSN: 1175-8708
Article publication date: 3 July 2020
Issue publication date: 1 December 2020
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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is derived from author dissertation which was a collective work of radical vulnerability. It would not have been possible without the creative, critical, brilliant, and loving insight of eight women English teachers, his participants (our Collective). Thank you Justine, Jaquinetta, Kristin, Tali, Sara, Kristen, Kathryn, and Kelsey.
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
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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