Mapping Affect in Critical Moments of Schooling for Disenfranchised Students
Date
Authors
Bruce, Judy
Schoone, Adrian
Turner-Adams, Hana
Piggot-Irvine, Eileen
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Abstract
Students disenfranchised from school have something important to teach us about how the education system might be shaped more equitably. Currently, meta-narratives of student failures and pathologies prevail and are reinforced by dominant behaviourist teaching practices. In this action research project, we sought to understand how teachers might inquire with students about critical moments from their past schooling experiences. Working within Alternative Education settings, students and teachers inquired together using a variety of mediated arts-based methods. In our analysis, I-poems illuminated the power of affective spaces to shape student identities. We identified that affect and disenfranchisement were connected through lived schooling experiences of shame, exclusion and racism. In addition to critical moments, we identified there were microaggressions in the everyday of schooling experiences, and we explored the healing power of microaffirmations in student–teacher relationships through the practices of emergent listening and relational pedagogy. Students’ affective storytelling and the analysis from this research invites us to suspend our attachment to dominant behaviourist approaches and modern, industrial concepts of schooling and consider alternatives. We invite educators to consider alternative approaches to student–teacher relationships by leaning into lessons taught from students in this research.Description
Keywords
3901 Curriculum and Pedagogy, 3903 Education Systems, 3904 Specialist Studies In Education, 39 Education, 1301 Education Systems, 1303 Specialist Studies in Education, 1608 Sociology, 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy, Affect, disenfranchisement, alternative education, action research, arts-based methods, microaffirmations
Source
Critical Studies in Education, ISSN: 1750-8487 (Print); 1750-8495 (Online), Informa UK Limited, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1-20. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2025.2517629
Publisher's version
Rights statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.