Bronwyn T Williams (2018) “Chapter 2: A feeling for literacy: emotions and dispositions” In Literacy Practices and Perceptions of Agency

• Intro
  • calmness and rationality are emotions
  • emotional states are embodied because of immediate responses
  • Purpose of this chapter: how emotion works (both cognitively and socially)
• Defining Emotion
  • Bronwyn uses “emotion” rather than “affect” in this book
    • because it is easier for interdisciplinary associations
  • “affect”: ==embodied meaning-making== (Wetherell, 2012)
    • Bronwyn: embodied meaning-making and performance, because it connects the social world
  • Embodiment: the biochemical reactions within the body; yet, it is not meaning-making
  • Barrett (2009): “emotion is a conceptual act of categorization and interpretation”
    • previous experience and neural patterns –> to categorize emotion as patterns
• Embodied Memories
  • strong emotion and easy memories
• Patterns of Emotional Experiences
  • before the formation of emotions, we need to accumulate emotions into patterns
  • the prior experiences become sediments
• Social Response and Meaning
  • In West tradition, we tend to take emotion as antithetical to “rationality and logic”
  • emotion as “affective practice” integrates the social and embodied personal
  • repetition–> patterns–> embodied personal emotions
  • perform emotion as rhetorical performance : to have a rhetorical effect
  • the social aspects of emotion: communication and response
    • “our emotions become meaningful in relationship and response from others”
      • This emphasizes the social construction of emotion: but the following sentence paraphrasing Wetherell is questionable
      • “each partner’s part becomes ==meaningful only== in relations to the whole affective dance” (Wetherell, 2012, 87) + “emotions are negotiated and shaped by the relationship”
      • Question: if “meaningful” refers to the meaning-making or the rhetorical performance, then what about the personalized and non-communicative performance of emotion? Is it meaningful only when there is an audience, or a stage to perform a rhetorical affect? Why cannot the meaningful remain at the personal?
      • Questions: Regarding the definition of emotion and its relation to the time (the immediate present vs past). Is emotion a performance, an event, or a feeling that can be remembered but not experienced at this moment? Or is it possible to remember emotion without experiencing it?
      • Question: Regarding emotion and its relation to the collectivity. I am more interested in affect/emotion in power relations. How much is the suppressed/marginalized related to affect as collective experiences and patterns? If that’s a pattern, it becomes meaningful to invite students to self-consciously relate the classroom power relations to how the marginalized community experiences outside of the classroom.
• School and Emotional Experiences
  • a description of “school:” less learning, more concerns with power, control, to create frustration, resentment, and discouragement
  • but students are less frustrated with the comments on their writing outside of school
    • My words: In the context out of school, students take negative emotions less seriously. But they take the judgment from instructors within school more seriously. It is perhaps because students have more agency out of school in those writing settings, but when at school, the fuller agency is to be found in teachers.
    • Question: about the use of “disposition.”
• Creating Different Emotional Experiences
  • pedagogical implications:
    • listen to students talk
    • attitudes to assignment: positive attitudes (e.g. personal investment, ownership, commitment)