Teacher thinking and affectively-charged events in adult language classrooms
Update: Watch a recording of the conference: https://connect.uottawa.ca/pup6fq2ibo7r/
Our first Seminar of the year, featuring Monica Waterhouse
Note: The seminar will be held in English
Date: November 8, 2018
Heure : from 3 to 3:45 p.m.
On site : LMX 477
Online: https://connect.uottawa.ca/educlang
Speaker
Monica Waterhouse is an Associate Professor in the Département de Langues, linguistiques et traduction, Université Laval where she teaches courses in English Second Language pedagogy, culture and language education, and research methodology. She has twenty years of English language teaching experience in diverse second and foreign language contexts. Her research draws on poststructuralism, Multiple Literacies Theory, and Deleuzian concepts to account for the contingency of living pedagogy in adult language learning contexts. Her current project, supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, explores the social and curricular stakes of language education in newcomer language programs through the lens of affect theory.
Description
This presentation focuses on the usefulness of materialist theorizing within the context of a study with English and French second language teachers in government-funded programs for adult newcomers to Canada. The study considers the problem of how these teachers pedagogically juggle teaching French or English, fostering their students’ societal integration, and responding to the challenges presented by affectively-charged classroom life. I begin by situating my materialist experimentations within Deleuze-Guattarian affect theory. I argue that it radically, and usefully, reframes familiar notions of affect, teacher thinking, and agency. I put these materialist reformulations to work in relation to qualitative data from the first phase of the three-year project. An online questionnaire invited Quebec FSL and Ontario ESL teachers working with newcomers to pedagogically respond to affectively-charged classroom vignettes. Focusing on responses associated with the first of the four vignettes comprising the questionnaire (N = 82) I present two rhizoanalytic data assemblages that aim to produce problems and questions (Masny, 2016). The first assemblage considers the tension between viewing classroom affects as problems-to-be-solved and as drivers of pedagogy. The second assemblage underscores the affective power of texts themselves in order to reassess the role of affect in the selection of teaching materials. This materialist-informed analysis does not yield new strategies for teachers to implement. Rather it is a provocation to embrace a more complex take on life in newcomer language classrooms than has been imagined through humanist-oriented applied linguistics frameworks (Pennycook, 2018).