‘It’s like you don’t want to read it again’: Exploring affects,trauma and ‘willful’ literacies

Abstract

This article reimagines classroom texts as unpredictable ‘willful objects’ that transmit ‘sticky’ intensities. The author argues that such intensities permeate classroom spaces and affectively position students in ways that inflict trauma, defined here as an insidious, daily injury that fosters and reinforces a narrow view of race, gender and/or sexuality. Honing in on these more-than-human encounters opens up possibilities to explore how the classroom, as an active body, provides testimony to the historical traumas that live on in the present – on the skin of students and teachers who are obligated to live with and/or bear witness to such injuries. Educators are invited to consider how a kind of healing can occur through a pedagogy of exposure, which seeks to not only expose but also recover traumatic wounds by embracing an affective, albeit risky, relationship to past and present histories of violence.

Keywords

Affects literacies trauma transmission fairy tales agency

I don’t really like white people.

Peter’s words – at once alive, present and mobile – frantically swirl around my body, forcing it, and the world around me, to come to a dead stop. Without thinking, I immediately blurt out, ‘What do you mean you don’t really like white people?’ Peter, perhaps noticing that I myself am white, releases a soft chuckle before pointing to the character of Sleeping Beauty, ‘Well, I mean in the story. Because um… I try… um I just keep on going along in the book, and they just keep on showing white people. That’s not a good book’.

And just like that, I am reminded that teaching and learning are affectively charged encounters that shape both literacies and the making of literate bodies. Within this moment, Peter’s dislike of ‘white people’ is not simply an emotion or feeling. This affect or energetic force actually moves him to view—and consequently reject – a text featuring white characters as bad (‘That’s not a good book’). There is also a sense that whiteness, as an affective mode commonly linked to white middle-class subjectivity (Muñoz, 2000), operates to preclude Peter from smoothly ‘going along in the book’, no matter his will to ‘try’. According to Ahmed (2006), ‘bodies that do not extend the whiteness of such spaces are “stopped,” which produces, we could say, disorienting effects… racism “stops” black bodies inhabiting space by extending through objects and others’ (pp. 24, 111). Peter’s affective encounter with whiteness, therefore, serves to momentarily ‘other’ his black body by stopping it/him from comfortably extending into the world of Sleeping Beauty. Thus, Peter’s environment and the things within it (e.g. the Sleeping Beauty text) actively impact who he can become as a boy/reader, here by disorienting him and diminishing his capacity to act. Since Peter’s black body is not entirely at home in the white world of traditional fairy tales (Hurley, 2005), he has difficulty fully inhabiting such spaces, which ultimately results in his refusal to finish reading Sleeping Beauty. Such actions, though, have consequences, especially for students of colour. For Peter, specifically, this moment works to potentially re/inscribe him as ‘lazy’ (according to classmates) and ‘struggling’ (according to his teacher, Ms Rizzo) – a ‘literacy failure’ in the making (Skelton and Francis, 2011: 459).

Within this article, I make the claim that there is neither a fixed boundary nor firm distinction between the individual student and the classroom environment, which can quite literally get into and under one’s skin, thereby enhancing or diminishing a student’s capacities or energies (Brennan, 2002). I do so in order to reposition classroom texts as unpredictable willful objects that transmit forces (e.g. of race, gender) which stick to student bodies. Building on the work of other critical scholars (Dutro, 2013; Erikson, 2005; Zembylas, 2006), I argue that such forces permeate classroom spaces and affectively position students, such as Peter, in ways that inflict trauma. By trauma, I mean a daily, insidious injury that fosters and reinforces a narrow view of race, gender and/or sexuality, among other things (Erikson, 2005). These injuries, in effect, threaten students’ capacities to create different ways to connect to their social worlds and to particular literacy texts/practices. I hone in on these more-than-human encounters in order to explore how the classroom, as an active body, provides testimony to the daily traumas that live on in the present – on the skin of students and teachers who are obligated to live with and/or bear witness to such injuries (Ahmed, 2005; Caruth, 1995; Felman, 1995; Zembylas, 2006). In the end, I propose that a kind of healing can occur if we as educators embrace what I call a pedagogy of exposure. Such a pedagogy seeks to not only expose but also recover traumatic wounds by reimagining an affective, albeit risky, relationship to past and present histories of violence (see Ahmed, 2005).

Theoretical framework

The affective turn in literacy

Primarily privileging representational theories of language, sociocultural and critical perspectives have long theorized classrooms as symbolic environments that convey particular ideologies about what counts as literacy and who counts as literate (Leander and Rowe, 2006; Siegel, 2006). Rather than viewing reading and writing as technical, neutral skill-sets, these perspectives attend to literacies as social, cultural, political (e.g. New Literacy Studies, see Barton and Hamilton, 2000; Gee, 1989; Heath, 1982; Scribner and Cole, 1981; Street, 2003) and multimodal practices (e.g. New London Group, see Cazden et al., 1996) shaped by dynamic social interactions and complex power relations. Scholars drawing upon sociocultural and critical views, therefore, argue that literacy is always socially situated and ideologically formed, thereby highlighting an ideological – as opposed to an autonomous – model of literacy (Street, 2003). While such views have brought much needed attention to the ways in which whiteness impinges on official literacy curricula to symbolically wound children of colour, whose experiences, languages and literacies continue to remain devalued (e.g. Kirkland, 2011; Kirkland and Jackson, 2009; Osorio, 2016; Sims Bishop, 1990; Souto-Manning, 2012; Thomas, 2013; Tyson, 1999), these theories of literacy are still very much connected to a fixed, representational logic that draws on Cartesian rationalism (Masny, 2009). Such logic assumes that literacy is (1) situated or fixed in material space, where ‘a context of literacy practice is considered to be background to the situated practices happening “within” it’ (Sheehy and Leander, 2004: 3) and (2) subjects/readers are autonomous agents of both meaning making and their own identities, that is disconnected from the body, as well as a heterogeneous field of vibrant matter (e.g. books, objects, see Bennett, 2010). This representational view of literacy largely disregards the agentive capacity of ‘things’ to impact children’s literacy development and the role of affects in the making of students as literate bodies and (gendered, raced etc.) subjects.

Taking up the recent affective turn (Clough, 2007) in literacy research as an alternative to the dominant Western model of self-containment, I wish to problematize the notion of classrooms as immobile backdrops and students as affectively contained, rational subjects. Instead, I conceptualize the classroom as an active body that is not only alive, mobile and permeable, but also affectively intertwined with other relational forces (e.g. race, gender) actively assembling in any given moment and space to shape both literacy learning and the making of literate subjects (see Dyson, 1993 for permeable curriculum; Leander et al., 2010 for classroom mobilities). Affect accompanies the human body as it experiences space and time and describes what connects, touches and moves students, or perhaps what keeps them stuck (Niccolini, 2016b; Seigworth, 1999). According to Seigworth and Gregg (2010) affect:

… is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinancies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations. (p. 1)

As there is no single theory of affect, scholars have referred to these forces in a number of ways: for example, as energies (Brennan, 2002), moods (Flatley, 2008), atmospheres (e.g. Anderson, 2014; Brennan, 2004), feelings (e.g. Cvetkovich, 2012; Muñoz, 2000; Ngai, 2005), emotions (Ahmed, 2011), intensities (Massumi, 1987) and vibrations (Henriques, 2010) (for a review of this literature, see Dernikos et al.). While exploring the various strands of affect theory is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that, despite the various metaphors employed, many affect theorists clearly differentiate between affects and emotions (e.g. post-Deleuzian scholars such as Massumi, 1987). However, I resist dichotomizing the two here and, like Cvetkovich (2012) and Zembylas (2014), use affect in a more generic sense: as a category that includes energies, emotions, forces, intensities, ‘impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways’ (Cvetkovich, 2012: 4) within relations of power, history and politics. With this in mind, this article seeks to expand the possibilities for how we think about classroom environments and the things within them by examining how texts actively transmit an array of affects which not only cling to children’s skin, but also produce lingering desires, feelings, actions and/or inactions that can do some real damage. In this way, affects, as a collection of sticky, ‘material, physiological things’ (Brennan, 2002: 6), have the power to enhance and deplete one’s energies, therefore significantly impacting a child’s schooling experience, sense of self and view of the social world.

Brennan’s (2002) theory of the transmission of affect is particularly useful for my analysis of classroom spaces as sites where energies circulate to produce intensities that often inflict daily injury through exposure to literacy texts or willful objects. According to Brennan, affects energetically flow in the air and, quite literally, enter social bodies:

We are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’… transmission breaches individual boundaries… this bound energy is felt in the flesh. (pp. 6, 17, 38)

By ‘transmission’, then, Brennan seeks to disrupt the Cartesian notion of the self-contained, rational subject by highlighting the openness and vulnerability of human bodies: the ways we affectively move between, and attach to, ‘things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of other things, including other affects’ (Niccolini, 2016b: 7). Brennan goes as far to say that, through our encounters with the environment, we collectively merge with people and ‘things’, as transmitted affects get buried within or rest upon one’s skin. Therefore, we are always, somehow, more-than-human or entangled within other social bodies – including classroom spaces and the things within them. Yet, this is not to say that affective transmission occurs ‘smoothly from body to body’ (Ahmed, 2006: 11), where students feel the classroom environment in the same way. As Ahmed (2006) notes, we do not move through social spaces as ‘neutral’ bodies devoid of distinct social and historical legacies. As such, the texts/objects that students come into contact with on a daily basis have the power to affect or stick to them differently.

Will and willfulness

When we think of will, the word willpower may come to mind – the idea that an individual subject can decide on something and use his/her rational mind to control a given event. Ahmed (2014) argues that, while the meaning of will has shifted historically, essentially it has been understood as an innate faculty, something all ‘normal’ subjects possess. This idea becomes significant within educational environments, where willfulness or to ‘will too much, or too little, or in the wrong way’ (p. 3) signals a problem.

Though willfulness often refers to student bodies/behaviours, here I would like to consider a theory of will in relation to objects, specifically literacy-related texts. According to Ahmed, will neither resides in nor belongs to subjects. If so, ‘willfulness too might not reside within a subject’ (p. 12) alone but in objects, as well. If we consider a willful student as someone who, in some way, refuses rationality, then a willful text, as I imagine it, is an object that has the agentive capacity to stick to students’ bodies, intra-act (Barad, 2007) with other social bodies (e.g. whiteness) and produce surging affects that shape a subject’s will or agency. That said, we should resist the dualistic pull to classify affects associated with will and willfulness as respectively good/bad. While willful objects transmit intensities that inflict trauma, they are not necessarily oppressive. As Stewart (2007) notes, affective encounters (far from predictable) hold both promise and threat. In the case of Peter, Sleeping Beauty’s willfulness opens up some new possibilities by enabling Peter to refuse his own bodily erasure, albeit not without cost: his labelling as a ‘struggling reader’.

Trauma

The idea that texts inflict trauma may seem strange, especially if we think of trauma in more traditional terms, for example as:

… an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea. While these feelings are normal, some people have difficulty moving on with their lives. (American Psychological Association, 2016)

However, according to prominent trauma scholar Caruth (1995), within the field of psychology, the question of what constitutes a traumatic experience is debatable, especially in light of the introduction of the category of Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise Specified (DESNOS) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This category recognizes a ‘distinct kind of traumatic experience in those for whom the experiences may not be available as flashbacks or simple memories but may be exhibited in more subtle kinds of behavior’ (p. viii, my emphasis). I believe these distinct experiences and subtle behaviours can be understood as affective encounters that, in one way or another, diminish a student’s capacity to act and possibly become (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) a ‘good’ reader/student. Again, these encounters are traumatic in that they involve the affective circulation of everyday, ‘mundanely catastrophic’ (Forter, 2007: 260) violence that results in insidious injury. Following Butler (2004), I define violence as an act of wounding that injures, exposes and/or puts another at risk. As Butler argues, human beings become vulnerable to violence through their ‘inter-relationships’ with the environment and other humans. Taking this idea a step further, I would like to suggest that a human body, as simultaneously ‘one but many’ (Blackman, 2012: xxii), may not necessarily be the root cause of an injurious act. In other words, objects – and not speaking subjects alone – can transmit violence, as well. Within a humanist world that privileges will or a human-centred notion of agency, this affective violence and its effects tend to escape us, as we do not normally position books/things as active agents with the power to wound. As a result, we do not always see, understand or take such violence seriously. For this reason, day in and day out, the traumatic effects of willful texts often go unnamed, unnoticed and unchallenged.

In order to attend to such violence, it is necessary to first reimagine trauma as an affectively transmitted event (see Atkinson and Richardson, 2013) that, as Caruth argues, refuses historical boundaries, for injuries (such as those associated with racism and slavery) transcend time and space, thereby forcing us to ‘rethink our notions of experience, and of communication, in therapy, in the classroom, and in literature’ (p. 4). Drawing on Caruth, Dutro (2008) further urges us to rethink trauma and affects in relation to literacy learning, so as to potentially re-envision the ‘classroom as a space of testimony and [critical] witness’ (p. 424). Trauma scholar Felman (1995) defines testimony as ‘bearing witness to a crisis or a trauma’ (p. 13), which involves speaking for and to others. Caruth adds that there are multiple ways to speak and hear others’ testimonies, pointing to the impossibility of fully knowing the depths of another’s trauma. Dutro imagines this process of testimony and witness as cyclical, where testifying seeks witnessing, and witnesses—specifically teachers—in turn should testify or share their own stories of loss, injury or trauma. For Dutro (2013), critical witnessing entails embracing another’s testimony (even if we can never fully understand or name it) and taking action by ‘holding that story at arm’s length and seeing and acting on the material differences that situate stories and those living and telling them’ (p. 311).

Building on these bodies of work, my analysis considers another kind of testimony and witnessing process that, as Ahmed (2005) writes, acknowledges the past in the present and the ways that the past/present lives on skin – and I would add, the skin of the active body of the classroom. According to Felman (1995), texts testify to our collective histories and oppressions. If we, as Brennan argues, are always merged with our environments and the texts within them, then the classroom as an active body must testify, as well. What this suggests is that the spaces of classrooms are composed of lively, vibrant materialities which flow around and through us in ways that call to us (Bennett, 2010). Students’ movement through classroom spaces and their reading of classroom texts are, therefore, ‘telling’ encounters which shape who they are moment-to-moment and who they might become. Such affective encounters result in ‘strangeness’ (Felman, 1995), or something that unsettles us (note my reaction to Peter’s comment). Thus, testimony and witnessing are embodied processes that involve affective energies (Dutro, 2013; Zembylas, 2005). ‘Our visceral unsteadiness is our entre to witnessing’ (Dutro, 2013: 309) and, potentially, hearing/acting upon what ‘bodies’ have to ‘say’.

Literature review

Affective transmission and literacy

While a number of scholars have explored the embodied dimensions of literacy learning (e.g. Dutro, 2003; Enriquez, 2011; Kontovourki and Siegel, 2009), there have been fewer studies examining embodiment and affective transmission (e.g. Leander and Boldt, 2013; Niccolini, 2016a; Thiel, 2015), especially as it relates to children of colour. In her qualitative study of “The Awesome Clubhouse” community centre, Thiel (2015) describes how Zack, a working-class African American boy, became a virtual superhero by donning a Wolverine costume which – anything but lifeless – generated affects that set a number of social actions into motion, namely, a clubhouse rescue mission to save the fictional Bumblebee. The costumes worn by Zack and the other kids created intensities which fuelled children’s play and enabled them to use their bodies to ‘write’ sophisticated stories. In this way, the intra-action of affects, bodies, spaces and things transformed students into text-producers and the clubhouse playground into a fictional adventure-land where porous bodies merged in ways that expanded children’s literacy learning and social world views.

Leander and Boldt (2013) further explore how bodies move collectively through the social and are invested with capacity: the power to affect other social bodies and, in turn, be affected and ‘effected’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). They follow Lee, a 10-year old Japanese-American boy, as he reads, plays and continually becomes in relation to Japanese graphic novels or the ever-changing world of manga. Despite being labelled a ‘struggling reader’, Lee’s intense pleasure enabled him to read for 12 hours in embodied ways, for example stopping at given moments to make special-effect noises or even morphing into a virtual character by putting on a hachimaki (Japanese headband). Lee’s becomings highlight how texts, as active agents, move with and through students, producing ongoing affective intensities that make new thoughts, feelings and identities possible. Similar to Thiel, though, Leander and Boldt’s study focuses more on the transformative power of bodies and texts – on affect’s promise, rather than its potential threat (Stewart, 2007). Less well documented, then, is the way affective transmission also works through texts to negatively impact the literacy practices, belief systems and world views of young children of colour.

Responses to school literacy and literature

Although Peter’s affective response to Sleeping Beauty was surprising to me, his actions actually position him alongside many other children of colour, especially black males, who have decidedly refused to read in school because they did not see themselves represented within classroom texts (Kirkland, 2011; Kirkland and Jackson, 2009; Thomas, 2013; Tyson, 1999). In studying the literacy practices of 11–14-year-old African American boys, Kirkland and Jackson (2009) highlight how schools wound black males by forcing them to read culturally irrelevant or ‘canonical’ texts that reinforce hegemonic ideologies of whiteness. They argue that one way in which study participants coped with this wounding was by enacting a ‘cool pose’: a kind of literacy shaped by race, gender and pop culture and symbolic of ‘a unique performative act, an attitude, comportment, or way of being characterized through verbal presentation and style’ (p. 280). Even though the school viewed these boys as ‘barely literate’, they in fact engaged in sophisticated literacy practices, such as Larry proclaiming his masculinity by using permanent ink to write ‘I’m the man’ on his new sneakers (p. 284). Kirkland and Jackson suggest that this act not only affirms Larry’s sense of himself as a black male but also demonstrates his attempts at challenging oppressive power systems, or ‘the Man’. While Kirkland and Jackson acknowledge how coolness often stands in opposition to academic learning and promotes misogyny, they do not fully explore its affective dimensions. They, instead, centre their discussion on how schools and school texts fail black males, who are often positioned as ‘at risk’, rather than ‘multiply literate’.

Of course, not all boys of colour reject school literacy, and there is evidence to suggest that some are doing quite well (Dutro, 2003; Skelton and Francis, 2011). Additionally, a number of studies support the idea that all children of colour benefit academically and socially when curricula include culturally relevant literature, which fosters increased engagement and attributes to overall self-esteem (Brooks and Browne, 2012; Brooks et al., 2008; Hefflin, 2002; Osorio, 2016). For example, Osorio (2016) found that using ‘border stories' as counter-narratives helped her second grade Latino/a students both see themselves in and connect to the books they were reading. Border stories opened up spaces for students to share their families’ own immigration experiences of crossing the US-Mexico border, challenge dominant narratives regarding ‘illegal immigrants’ and, above all, feel ‘normal’ (p. 11).

Yet, despite the benefits, researchers caution that the inclusion of culturally relevant texts is not sufficient in and of itself to challenge the Western ‘canon of cultural literacy’, as some studies indicate that children of colour may actually possess little knowledge of certain histories and oppressions, thereby limiting their overall understanding and/or response to given texts (Brooks et al., 2008; Lehr and Thompson, 2000). For example, Brooks et al. (2008) concluded that while some African American females could recognize the skin-colour teasing experienced by the character Maleeka in Flake’s The Skin I’m In, they did not quite link colourism to gender and racial inequities, thereby missing an opportunity to ‘grapple with a redefined beauty aesthetic for African American girls’ (p. 887). These findings remind us that all texts transmit ideologies that shape interpretative responses to literature in both expected and unexpected ways.

This article contributes uniquely to the research on the reader responses of children of colour by examining how texts, as active agents, have the capacity to not only shape children’s interpretive responses to literature (here, fairy tales), but also inflict affective trauma. In her research on trauma and literacies, Dutro (2008) argues that emotional and psychological trauma may result as a response to literature. Working with four African American girls engaged in a book-club discussion of Samantha Saves the Day, Dutro explores how fifth-grader Chrissie’s personal connection to the orphaned character Samantha surprisingly opened up a space for her to testify to the tragic loss of her own father: ‘He thought he had the flu, but he had cancer…. That’s why I was crying on this book’ (p. 430). Following Chrissie’s testimony, Dutro and two of the other girls felt compelled to bear witness to Chrissie’s trauma, as well as share their own stories of loss (i.e. testify). In the end, Dutro suggests that traumatic wound healing can occur in classroom spaces if teachers and students engage in a cyclical/reciprocal process of testimony and witnessing. While I agree with Dutro that trauma resulting from a response to literature can be healed, in part, through such processes, I wish to make clear that this article distinctly positions trauma as something that can be, not only awakened but also willfully inflicted, thereby attending to the overlooked agential role of both readers and texts within reader response (see Rosenblatt, 1993 for transactional theory and aesthetic responses).

Contextualizing the research

Ms Rizzo’s first grade classroom, part of a Title 1 public elementary school, was nestled in an economically and culturally diverse neighbourhood in the bustling city of Manhattan (NY). The school’s population consisted of about 114 students per grade (K-5), where 47% of the students were female and 53% male. Approximately 53% of the student body was Hispanic, 26% African American, 15% White, 0.4% American Indian or Alaskan Native, 5% Asian and 0.3% multiracial. Ms Rizzo’s class itself was made up of 24 students (17 boys, 7 girls) of African American, European American, Latin American and Asian descent. The students featured in this article identified as Hispanic (Carl, Austin, Ana and London) and African American (Peter, Beth and Maya). Ms Rizzo, who had been teaching for 5 years, identified as Hispanic.

The data presented here derived from a 6-month ethnographic study exploring the affective encounters that impacted the making of first-grade students as ‘un/successful’ readers. Specifically, I examined how objects, spaces, affects and ‘bodies’ constantly intra-acted to shape what counted as literacy and who counted as successfully literate within this first grade class. Ms Rizzo, in line with the school’s mandated literacy curriculum, implemented a balanced approach to literacy learning based on Core Knowledge Language Arts, the Teachers College Reading and Writing workshop model, and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy. According to Ms Rizzo, successful literacy students were expected to climb up text levels, apply workshop-model strategies while reading independently, accurately answer Core Knowledge read-aloud questions and actively take control of their bodies in order to efficiently execute a number of controlled gestures (see Figure 1). Although Ms Rizzo strove to adhere to school mandates, she at times expressed concerns, specifically in relation to the Core Knowledge read-aloud series, which primarily privileged Western history, literature and culture—the so-called canon of cultural literacy (Core Knowledge Foundation, 2016). As Ms Rizzo shared her concerns with me, I in turn shared my observations and analyses with her. Towards the end of the school year, Ms Rizzo and I used these noticings to create read-aloud lessons that sought to engage first-graders in social-critical literacies (Jones, 2006). While Ms Rizzo and I later had a difficult time inviting student talk on the rug, I did not encounter much difficulty in getting students to open up to me one-on-one or in small groups. Though I cannot say for sure why that was, I do believe that my vulnerability may have helped put the students at ease. I readily shared my stories, childhood struggles and experiences with them. Many students, for instance, were surprised to hear that my parents were Greek immigrants and that I (like some of them) had entered kindergarten not speaking English. I also tried, as best I could, to give students space to share their own stories and to respond freely to situations – to cry, laugh, hug and even say ‘inappropriate’ things.

Figure 1.

Thumbs-up.

My interest in understanding literacy learning as transcorporeal social encounters led me to utilize ethnographic methods (Britzman, 1995) to plug my qualitative enquiry into theories of affect (e.g. Brennan, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), will/willfulness (Ahmed, 2014) and trauma (e.g. Felman 1995). Data sources included participant observations, ethnographic fieldnotes, informal student and teacher interviews, and objects/texts related to literacy practices. I observed Ms Rizzo and her students every Monday and Wednesday during the Readers Workshop/Read-aloud period, which usually took place everyday from 8:55 to 10:23 a.m. I purposefully selected each Monday because I desired access to literacy instruction during a ‘typical’ day (as determined by Ms Rizzo) (LeCompte and Schensul, 2010). From 10:24 a.m. to noon, I continued to observe while also helping out the teacher with mundane tasks (e.g. making copies, organizing files). By the end of the school year, my observations became more frequent, whereby I visited the site daily: arriving first thing in the morning (around 8:30 a.m.) and often staying until dismissal (around 2:15 p.m.).

Following Jackson and Mazzei (2012), I used ‘thinking with theory’ or ‘plugging in’ as an analytic strategy to help me re/read data across multiple theories/theorists, considering how theory directly shapes the way I view data, participants, literacy, trauma, texts and classroom environments. Plugging into affect theories, specifically, enabled me to view students, texts and classroom environments as porous and permeable assemblages of human and non-human forces that escape language capture (MacLure, 2013). As such, I resisted the representational pull to search for explicable meaning by coding data in a more traditional sense. That is, I did not treat data as if it were a still object that I could dissect and examine for conclusive patterns or recurring themes, to ask: What does this literacy event or encounter mean? Instead, appropriating a ‘what if’ stance (Handsfield, 2007), I viewed all data as alive – as active matter with which I might engage in ongoing and open-ended conversation. I repeatedly revisited/reread/reinterpreted my conversations with data, asking: How does this literacy event or encounter work? What ‘bodies’ are connecting or assembling within these moments? What are the affects and effects of such assemblages? What other possibilities might exist, for example, What if Peter’s refusal to read is not an act of being lazy? Impossible to fully capture with words (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012), thinking with data/theory is very much an embodied engagement that involves ‘poring over the data, annotating, describing, linking, bringing theory to bear, recalling what others have written, and seeing things from different angles’ (MacLure, 2013: 174). It is a lively process that opens us up to surprise, multiplicity and even wonder (MacLure, 2013). As Niccolini (2016a) asserts, this type of analysis concerns itself less with representational fidelity and more with working with data to disrupt our usual thinking: ‘to enliven rather than report, to render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than to faithfully describe’ (p. 7, as cited in Vannini, 2015: 15). In this way, I am not using data to prove that students’ bodily in/actions definitively represent or signify a singular reality. Rather, by ‘reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 4), I am exploring what emergent threats and possibilities exist as affects willfully move through classroom spaces and texts to re/produce students as particular kinds of readers and subjects. By doing so, I hope to reimagine literacy learning as more affectively malleable and, in turn, more equitable (Leander et al., 2010).

Testimonial encounters: The skin I’m not in

In what follows, I explore how the socio-historical forces of race, gender and hetero/sexuality picked up speed as they charged through classroom texts and spaces, momentarily im/mobilizing particular bodies along the way: namely, Peter, Carl, Beth, London, Ana and Maya. I do so to highlight, not the brutality of past histories, but ‘the brutality of the passing over’ of such histories (Ahmed, 2005: 78). It is my sincere hope that by making these brutalities visible you not only hear the children’s testimonies of trauma but also feel affect’s potential threat and promise. I conclude my discussion by inviting you to consider a pedagogy of exposure, which aims to expose traumatic violence in order to create more equitable literacy environments where healing becomes a site of pedagogical possibilities.

Peter

Peter’s testimony in relation to whiteness unsteadied me, yet also enabled me to see the classroom anew—as no longer a lifeless, dead place, but rather an active body of affective flows, where bodies might speak or testify to their injuries in vibrant ways. Ms Rizzo and the students, however, did not seem to recognize Peter’s testimonies. I have to admit that, at first, I didn’t either. My initial impression of Peter was that he struggled to read and, as a result, did not engage in reading-related activities. It never occurred to me that something more could be at play. Interestingly enough, even though Peter was only slightly below grade-level for reading, Ms Rizzo, Peter’s classmates and I all – in one way or another – read his body as struggling, willful and/or lazy, not only for his refusal to read but also for his predilection for A-level ‘easy books’:

Beth: When we were reading and the teacher said you can get a book from the basket, um, Peter took from a A basket and it was about letters and he was reading it.

Austin: I know, right! So bad.

Miss Bessie: Is that a bad thing to read an A book?

Beth: Yes, because it’s so easy… he’s on a higher level and he just wants to read easy books to be funny….

Austin: So lazy!

According to Beth and Austin, Peter’s taking of A-level texts marks him as a bit of a class clown: a ‘lazy’ student who neither makes good choices (‘so bad’) nor desires to learn. Throughout my time in Ms Rizzo’s classroom, I found that many students shared similar sentiments, often referring to Peter as ‘silly’, ‘lazy’ or, simply, ‘not a good reader’. While Ms Rizzo never called Peter lazy, she did identify him as a ‘struggling reader’ who was often ‘not reading and off-task’. For this reason, she constantly reminded Peter to ‘take [books] from the E bin’; ‘sit ready’; ‘get busy’; ‘stop being silly’; and ‘review your [reading] goals’. Beth, on the other hand, suggests that Peter’s intra-actions with text, while problematic, do not necessarily result from a struggle to read but, rather, are motivated by his desire to be ‘funny’.

Though Beth’s point is well taken, I cannot help but wonder: What if Peter’s funny or cool behaviour also points to his desire to ‘do boy’ in racially specific ways (Kirkland and Jackson, 2009)—ways that perhaps enable him to cope with the willfulness of classroom texts? As Renold (2004) argues, when focusing on the ‘underachieving boy’ we must also attend to the forces of gender and heterosexuality that flow into classroom spaces, working to influence the way young males, especially black males, perform their gendered identities, for example through braggadocio, fashion, language, sports, non-studiousness and ‘having a laugh’ (p. 248; see also Kirkland and Jackson, 2009). In the case of Peter, he often did not read during Readers Workshop time and instead opted to flex his muscles while slouching in his chair, walk around the room to talk to female students (namely London) and/or say such things as, ‘No way I’m reading that [Beauty and the Beast]… because I’m a man’. What I would like to open up here, then, is the possibility that Peter’s reading of easy-texts and non-reading of classic fairy tales is not simply his choice, his decision, but involves complex configurations (e.g. forces of race and hegemonic masculinities; willful texts) that move with Peter’s body in ways that facilitate his becoming a ‘lazy’ or ‘struggling reader’. That is, while reading specific levelled and ‘classic’ texts may count as a successful literacy behaviour within this first-grade class, this intra-action may also produce a kind of insidious trauma that threatens Peter’s capacity to function as a ‘proper’ black male.

Carl

In contrast to Peter, Carl, a slim Hispanic boy with dark brown hair and big brown eyes, often read classroom texts with fervour – that is until the end of the school year when Ms Rizzo’s class began the Core Knowledge fairy tale unit.

(Read-Aloud Time in the Rug Area)

Ms Rizzo: Ok, first graders, thumbs up if you liked the story [Rumpelstiltskin].

[Almost all students position their right thumbs upright in the air, see Figure 1] Great, me too!

As I watch thumbs fly up into the air, I notice something peculiar going on in the far right-hand corner of the rug area, opposite to where Ms Rizzo is seated. Carl, turning his body away from the image of Rumplestiltskin (see Figure 2), begins to slowly sway his body back and forth, never once looking at Ms Rizzo to signal his ‘like[d]’ for this classic fairy tale. Soon enough, Carl’s fingers begin to break free from the confined space of his individual rug square and wander off towards the white board. His willful thumb then tap, tap, taps away at the wall, but never once does it go up.

Figure 2.

Rumpelstiltskin and white skin colour.

Since Carl’s reading behaviours usually aligned with those of a ‘good reader’, his obvious disengagement confuses me. A few minutes later, once the students return to their work tables, I decide to ask Carl and the other boys sitting at table 6 whether or not they liked the story of Rumpelstiltskin.

Carl: I didn’t like that everyone’s hands and faces were all white.

Austin: Yes!

Miss Bessie: Why does that bother you guys?

Carl: (heavy sigh) Because it starts to get boring. They all start to blend in with each other. All of them are white.

Miss Bessie: Ok, so how do you feel when you only see white people in the story?

Austin: Um–

Carl: No, not people, skin colour. You keep on seeing the same skin colour and it starts to get boring, and um it’s like you don’t want to read it again.

Unlike Peter, who stated he did not like white people, Carl does not seem to directly categorize people by race. In some ways, he positions race as an encounter that hooks onto people’s ‘skin’ – even correcting me when I say ‘white people’. It’s not quite white people that block Carl’s brown body from extending into Rumpelstiltskin’s world. Rather, the text itself intensifies racist forces circulating to attach privilege to white skin colour, in ways that re/orient the spaces of Ms Rizzo’s class around whiteness and deeply trouble Carl: ‘I didn’t like that everyone’s hands and faces were all white’. According to Ahmed (2006), social worlds have skin impacted by different bodies coming and going, where bodies with lighter skin colour have historically been more valued (Sims Bishop, 2007, cited in Brooks et al., 2008). It is this value that enables white bodies to uncontrollably surge up again and again within Rumpelstiltskin and other classic fairy tales. Yet, this constant coming and going of whiteness also produces affects that somehow keep Carl’s brown body stuck in repetition, so that he is now unable to transmit his intensities in ways that affirm his good reader status, for example by actively engaging with the story and putting his thumb up to show appreciation. Unable to ‘blend’ in, Carl becomes bored, visibly upset, and does not want to even read such books ‘again’.

Although I cannot say for sure whether Carl will refuse to read other classic texts in the future, I did notice that he increasingly became more withdrawn during the last few weeks of Readers Workshop. For instance, when Ms Rizzo asked everyone to describe their favourite fairy tale character in their Reader Response notebooks, Carl began to instead doodle, to which Ms Rizzo responded, ‘Get busy, Carl—I want to see you working like London’. Even though Ms Rizzo never expressed any real concern over Carl’s behaviour, if such responses to text persist, they could potentially set Carl along a path of future academic failure where he may be labelled and tracked accordingly. According to Leander and Rowe (2006), representational or singular readings of children’s bodies ‘extend in all directions’ to impact ‘future interpretations, effects, and identity spaces’ (p. 436). There is a possibility, then, that Carl’s refusal to read/write/respond could, over time, shift his good reader identity and, in turn, his future trajectory, as his actions could be read as a sign of reading difficulty or disability – not a testimony to his own bodily erasure. Ahmed (2006) goes on to argue that our bodies are impacted by histories of oppression, which ‘make[s] the world white’ (p. 111). Carl reminds us that even if we do not fully know, understand or remember such histories, our bodies, on some level, feel their affective force.

Beth, London, Ana and Maya: Shame and disappearing acts

The orientation of classroom spaces around whiteness generated affects that, at times, made students of colour feel upset, emotionally detached from learning (e.g. Peter and Carl) and even ashamed. I began to witness this affective wounding and the shame attached to it more and more as Ms Rizzo and students progressed through the fairy-tale unit in the Core Knowledge read-aloud series. In this next section, I examine how, for students of colour such as Beth, these ‘happy’ tales also triggered ‘bad feelings’ (Ahmed, 2005), which troubled the notion of living happily ever after and further highlighted the ways willful texts impacted students’ self-image.

The Core Knowledge fairy tales, although classic (e.g. Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel), were largely focused on white, wealthy, heterosexual men and women. At the same time, these stories also seemed to privilege good female heroines who were outwardly feminine in appearance (e.g. wearing make-up and dresses). While Beth, a young African American girl, seemed intensely excited by the prospect of happily ever after (Beth: Ooh, true love!), her talk and actions suggested that she (like Peter and Carl) could not wholly relate to these characters – despite her fascination with them. In fact, the image of Sleeping Beauty, situated near Beth’s work table, appeared to captivate Beth, who would often stare at it for minutes on end (see Figure 3). Many of the other girls in Ms Rizzo’s class seemed equally fascinated by the image, often commenting on how long and beautiful Sleeping Beauty’s hair was:

London: Yeah, I wish I had beautiful hair like Sleeping Beauty. I don’t like short hair, I like long hair. It’s makes you look really pretty.

Figure 3.

Sleeping Beauty: ‘Pretty’ hair.

Ana: Like Ms Rizzo’s hair.

London: Yeah that’s pretty hair. It’s not okay to have short hair because then it makes you look like a boy.

Beth: It’s okay if you have hair up to here? [pointing to her shoulder]

London: Um, no, usually longer.

Beth: Well, short hair won’t get in your way.

London: No, long hair is better. It’s beautiful.

Ana: I agree with London.

In this scene, it is important to consider how the girls’ talk constitutes a form of testimony. To quote Dutro (2013), ‘a testimony is not simply a conveyance of observed events; it is important to attend to how a person translates his or her experience of historical trauma across time and space’ (p. 315). London and Ana seem to directly equate being ‘beautiful’ with Sleeping Beauty and her long ‘pretty’ hair, which is somehow ‘better’ than the shorter, coarser hair they all have. By doing so, they reify Eurocentric beauty standards that, as many scholars argue, girls of colour have been internalizing since the days of slavery (e.g. see Brooks and McNair, 2014; Sims Bishop, 2007, cited in Brooks et al., 2008). Historically, features ascribed to whites (such as light skin and straight hair) signified social/economic advantage, rationality, good-breeding and beauty, while features ascribed to blacks (such as dark skin and kinky hair) signified irrationality, barbarity and ugliness (Brooks and McNair, 2014; Hunter, 2005, as cited in Brooks et al., 2008). These ideas surface in the present, clinging to the social skin of Ms Rizzo’s classroom through the willfulness of Sleeping Beauty. As Hurley (2005) notes, children of colour tend to form ideas about what counts as beautiful through their exposure to mainstream fairy tales: ideas which both produce and reinforce racist stereotypes and negative self-images. This occurs when students subconsciously connect beauty to whiteness – specifically, an idealized white femininity – which, in turn, becomes linked to goodness and happiness. In contrast, blackness becomes linked to ugliness and badness. Perhaps for this reason, the ‘short’ hair possessed by all three girls becomes something London and Ana do not ‘like’: a thing London ‘wish[es]’ she did not have. It is this not having which, in effect, positions the girls outside of normative femininity (‘it makes you look like a boy’), making London and Ana feel both bad and not ‘really pretty’.

Interestingly enough, while London and Ana seem sure that ‘good hair’ is long and straight, Beth questions these sentiments (‘It’s okay if you have hair up to here?’). When I later ask the girls if they enjoyed the variant version of Sleeping Beauty with black characters, Beth once again connects our discussion to hair:

Beth: I liked her hair in this version [variant].

London: I like the other version better [traditional].

Ana: I like the other version better, too.

Maya: Me too.

Ana: She’s prettier in the other version.

London: I agree.

Maya: Yeah.

Miss Bessie: What makes her prettier?

Maya: Her hair and the colour of her hair and dress. It’s not so poofy in the other version.

Miss Bessie: What about her hair?

Maya: Her hair is really long, and here it’s short and in a braid. Ugh! [rolls her eyes and makes a face]

Initially, Beth shares her preference for black Sleeping Beauty’s hair (‘I like her hair in this version’), which looks remarkably similar to her own hair. The other girls, however, still seem fascinated by white Sleeping Beauty, in ways that continue to privilege white ideals of beauty. In this moment, London, Ana and Maya all insist that white Sleeping Beauty is both ‘better’ and ‘prettier’ than black Sleeping Beauty simply because of her ‘long,’ straight, light-coloured hair – which, incidentally, looks nothing like their own hair. According to Graff (2011), it is odd that slavery has been largely absent from the literature on trauma, as the affect of shame associated with it as an ideological system continues to transmit across generations. By shame, she means an emergent feeling that sinks deeply into our fleshy bodies, convincing us – whether consciously or subconsciously – that we are somehow ‘wrong, inferior, flawed, weak, or dirty’ (p. 134). Within this vignette, we witness these shame-induced intensities affectively settle into student body parts and materialize through, for example eye/facial expressions (note Maya’s eye roll when talking about black Sleeping Beauty), bodily interjections of disgust (‘Ugh!’) and, above all, the vitality of hair. Though we have come to think of hair as inert and lifeless, here we witness its agential force: powerfully moving Ana, London and Maya to judge bodies in racial- and gender-specific ways, as it all the while produces silence in Beth.

Soon after this exchange, Beth increasingly began wearing hoodies that hid her short, black hair from view. She later reveals:

Beth: Now, I have beautiful hair. (As she says this, she caresses the grey hoodie covering her hair/head)

Miss Bessie: What do you mean now? There’s nothing wrong with your hair.

Beth: (nodding her head from side to side) It’s black hair!

Miss Bessie: What do you mean black hair? I have dark hair, too. (Beth shakes her head from left to right before walking away)

For Beth, having ‘beautiful hair’ now becomes possible through an attempt to conceal her ‘black hair’, which she intimates is not the same as my ‘dark hair’. When I try to reassure Beth (‘There’s nothing wrong with your hair’), she immediately associates the word ‘wrong’ with blackness/race (‘It’s black hair!’), suggesting there is indeed something bad or inferior about her hair. It would seem, then, that the ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010) of Sleeping Beauty, coupled with the girls’ comments, elicited a feeling of shame in Beth for failing to approximate an ideal of whiteness (Ahmed, 2005). As Ahmed (2005) argues, shame produces painful, bad feelings that are directed inward towards the self, at the same time that these feelings are addressed to another. Though Beth appears to now feel pretty while wearing hoodies to cover her hair (‘Now, I have beautiful hair’), her actions effectively serve to reinforce the rigid social ideals that oppress her and, in turn, do little to affirm and celebrate her own hair as both beautiful and normal. Ultimately, Beth’s testimony, together with the testimonies of Peter, Carl, Ana, London and Maya, shows us that the affects and effects of willful objects have the potential to disorient subjects, promote narrow views of race and gender and, above all, negatively impact self-esteem in ways that may be psychically ‘damaging’ (Hurley, 2005).

Moving towards a pedagogy of exposure

What is it that keeps teachers of literacy from witnessing daily trauma and, more importantly, from taking action? Quite possibly, we have grown so accustomed to viewing students and teachers as autonomous agents with the power to will away vulnerability that we have discounted the ways the classroom, as an active body of im/material forces, works to shape students’ subjectivities and life trajectories. Perhaps if we accept that literacies themselves are animate, affective, unpredictable and willful, we can begin to ask different, more ethically responsive questions, such as: How might teachers hear, answer and react to testimonial calls? And, how can hearing and responding to such calls work to heal the traumas that permeate classroom spaces? What might happen if literacy educators used these questions and others to encounter testimony and witnessing as processes that always connect us to other bodies and situations – to the past, present and future, to ‘a larger field of life’ (Massumi, 2003)?

While I do not claim to have the answers, I have begun to think about what these questions might mean for my own teaching. Admittedly, when Ms Rizzo and I attempted to open up space for counter-narratives and more critical engagements with text (Jones, 2006), our efforts backfired. For instance, when Ms Rizzo asked students to compare and contrast two different versions of Sleeping Beauty (e.g. Who or what seems to be included or excluded in the traditional tale?), each featuring a black and white protagonist, race or skin colour never came up in our rug discussions (see Figures 3 and 4). Yet, off the rug, students continued to testify to their injuries again and again through their embodied actions. It’s likely, as Janks (2002) notes, that we did not account for the fact that textual deconstruction privileges the rational – rather than affective – investments of readers, which, unfortunately, reinforces the notion that what matters within classrooms is a rationality devoid of affectivity (Ellsworth, 1992). This ‘failed’ teaching moment, however, offers a glimpse into how unpredictable teaching and learning can be and suggests that, in order to enact change, ‘educators might pay more attention to how affect offers richly generative, but often overlooked, sites of pedagogical force’ (Niccolini, 2016a: 1). I, therefore, invite educators to consider the possibility that traumatic healing can occur if we embrace a pedagogy of exposure that seeks to remember fleshy bodies and their affective connections, as well as obligations, to each other (Massumi, 2003).

Figure 4.

Counter-narratives: Sleeping Beauty.

Remembering an array of bodies

Embracing a pedagogy of exposure begins by first acknowledging that teaching and learning involve transcorporeal bodies and affective energies. Learning to read is as much an embodied process as it is an affective one, and indeed, sociocultural and critical scholars have explored the embodied dimensions of literacy learning (see Siegel, 2006). Yet, a pedagogy of exposure urges us to view literacy learning as more than embodied—as involving ‘an array of bodies’ (Bennett, 2010: 112, my emphasis): an affective assemblage of material, moral, cognitive, rational, historical, discursive, physical and spatial elements (among other things) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Leander and Rowe, 2006). Thus, while social-practice perspectives of school literacy have examined how students experience texts (writ large) and embody literacies, they have not delved deeply into the affective role of collective bodies in children’s literacy learning and psychosocial development. By ‘turning to’ affect, this article sheds light on the psychic trauma and complex emotions students experience as they intra-act with particular literacy texts/objects, which are viewed here as active agents or participants. Additionally, it opens us up to the liveness of classroom environments: the movements, relations and happenings that emerge within literacy classrooms to catch us by surprise. Affective analyses bring these everyday encounters into sharper view and enable us to closely attend to, as well as trouble, the steady accumulation of emotional experiences – what may often appear to be ‘daily insignificances’ (Seigworth, 1999). As Peter’s refusal to read Sleeping Beauty reminds us, these ‘insignificances’ eventually add up to become something, which indicates that ‘the past isn’t something that you can cast off and leave behind. Instead, the past continues to persist right alongside the present’ (Seigworth, 1999), inevitably impacting a child’s sense of self and educational future.

Thus, a pedagogy of exposure also demands that we refuse to cover or conceal the way past histories of violence affectively flow into classroom spaces to wound students, largely by keeping whiteness and other social forces hidden (Ahmed, 2005). This becomes particularly significant within the Unites States where, to date, 42 states have officially adopted Common Core, or state-governed national standards that assume a shared or monocultural knowledge base for literacy. While the desire to equalize access to literacy education across nation-states is perhaps well-intentioned, the overall danger of the standards lies in accompanying metanarratives of will, choice, opportunity and self-invention/success (Dernikos, 2015). Drawing upon Enlightenment (1685–1815) discourses which legitimate the culture, language and history of ‘Western man’, the standards re/forward the humanist notion that American students, now more than ever, live in a meritocracy where literacy success becomes a matter of individual, rational will, thereby placing personal responsibility and moral blame on those students who do not ‘choose’ to successfully meet the standards, or fail. These discursive forces, in effect, discount difference, obscure the agency of classroom texts, and privilege a generic or ‘normative’ child (read: white, middle class) with the potential to thrive and compete in a globalized market economy (Davies and Saltmarsh, 2007). Oddly enough, the standards do regard the text as pivotal to the act of reading, but as a scientific object of study and not as an active, political agent. As such, students (presumably) do not transact (Rosenblatt, 1993) or intra-act with texts. Instead, they engage in close reading of ‘complex’ non-fiction and Western ‘canonical’ texts: an act which not only serves to deprivilege the histories and cultures of diverse children (Banks, 1993), but also to deemphasize the feelings, identities and affective responses of all readers (see Calkins et al., 2012; Dernikos, 2015).

Though not an easy task, making such moving forces visible within classroom spaces involves a pedagogy that understands traumatic violence as an affective event entangled with shame (Ahmed, 2005). In other words, students who experience trauma are also subjected to a kind of transmitted shame that transcends time and space (e.g. consider Beth). According to Ahmed (2005), the word shame derives from the ‘Indo-European verb “to cover”, which associates shame with other words such as hide… concealment… wounding’ (p. 76). These associations suggest that ‘cover[ing]’ and ‘wounding’ go hand in hand. Wounds heal, then, not by covering over or concealing them, but by exposing them to the self and to others, where ‘recovery is a form of exposure’ (Ahmed, 2005: 83). Thus, exposure asks teachers to expose/recover wounds by recognizing that the violence and shame associated with past histories lives on in the present—in and on our sticky skins—and must not be passed over. This recognition, more specifically, involves: (1) reimagining trauma as an everyday, insidious event, rather than a catastrophic injury (Cvetkovich, 2007) and (2) sensitizing ourselves to the shameful/violent histories that affectively transmit through classroom texts, so that we may begin to disrupt the invisibility or ‘normalization’ of such trauma. Otherwise, we may unknowingly serve to further wound students through our ‘disembodied’ engagements with particular literacy texts and practices. As Brennan (2002) so aptly notes, affects are vehicles ‘connecting individuals to one another and the environment’ (p. 19). We are, therefore, inextricably connected to the classroom environment and to its willful objects. As such, we can never fully distance ourselves from the threat and promise of classroom texts, which impact our agency. That’s why it’s never enough to simply focus our efforts on critical or rational analysis (e.g. critical literacy). Rather, as literacy teachers, we must embrace a kind of distributive agency that gives affective energies and the force of things their due (Bennett, 2010). In short, we must be open to a more vulnerable, ‘impulsive, less intentional model of subjectivity’ (Ahmed, 2014: 175), where we work to follow willfulness around a bit.

But what exactly might that pedagogical journey look like or entail? While I imagine enacting and navigating a pedagogy of exposure involves many unknowable twists and turns, I’d nevertheless like to conclude by offering a few suggestions to guide you on your way.

Invite affective intra-action

A pedagogy that aims to expose traumatic violence must honour the animacy and transcorporeality of classroom environments. This involves treating classroom spaces as living things, where texts of all kinds (e.g. images, classroom charts, artwork) adorn walls, shelves etc. as ‘in-progress’ works that can be altered, extended upon and questioned (see Davies, 2014). Literacy educators who enact a pedagogy of exposure must, therefore, actively question how books, charts and other materials work to transmit racialized, gendered, classist and/or heterosexualized messages. In addition to considering what the body of the classroom is saying, literacy educators should reflect upon the extent to which they appropriate and reinforce rigid normativities that work to re-establish racism, sexism and other exclusions.

In a somewhat similar vein, such a pedagogy invites children’s words, images, movements and testimonies to be part of the classroom’s skin. Literacy educators should aim to investigate these fleshy encounters on a daily basis by paying particular attention to the call of things (Bennett, 2010) and what bodies have to say. However, a word of caution: instead of assuming you know what bodily actions mean, be open to seeing/hearing/feeling other possibilities. Rather than judging students through a deficit lens, keep asking yourself: What if something more is at work here?

Disrupt the ‘classics’

Although willful texts have the capacity to psychically wound students by positioning them as ‘unsuccessful’ literacy learners, or worse, ‘not-quite-human’ (see Weheliye, 2014 for critique of ideal humanist subject), educators might temper this threat by expanding their notion of classic literature (see e.g. McNair, 2010; resources include: Oyate, Native American literature www.oyate.org; Pura Belpré Award, Latino/a literature www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/belpremedal; Coretta Scott King Award, African American literature www.ala.org/emiert/cskbookawards; Asian Pacific American Award for Literature: www.apalaweb.org/awards/literature-awards/). Incorporating counter-narratives and culturally authentic texts that children can connect to/feel with offer a means of honouring historically marginalized children, disrupting oppressive norms, and linking past to present-day inequities in order to explore race, gender and other difficult knowledge. That said, educators must make histories of oppression visible by sharing the background knowledge needed to connect to, engage with, and critique given stories (see Brooks and Hampton, 2005).

Be open…

Lastly, embracing a pedagogy of exposure entails adopting an ethic of care that honours emotions, feelings and personal connections (Howard, 2003). Rather than giving into a ‘politics of emotion’ that pathologizes the expression of feelings in classroom spaces (Thiel, 2014: 39), teachers should openly share their stories and testimonies with children, highlighting the ways inequities have shaped their own experiences and identities. In turn, students should have opportunities to testify or respond to these invitations (and others) in multimodal ways that do not necessarily privilege ‘rug talk’: for example through bodily movement. Remember, literacies are vibrant and willful, so expect unpredictability and affective emergence!

You should, of course, expect uncertainty, and that things will fall apart. But, this is what Massumi (2003) reminds us is so hopeful about affects and, I would add, an affective pedagogy of exposure. It forces you to find ‘a manoeuvre you didn’t know you had, and couldn’t have just thought your way into…. It can change you, expand you’, move and unsettle you. It can even pull you into wondrous places you never intended to go (Stewart, 2007).

That’s what willful literacies are all about.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nancy Lesko for her insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I am also grateful to the reviewers and editors for their thoughtful suggestions.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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