Emotions in Immigrant Language Education: from Acquisition Barrier to Affective Pedagogy - Monica Waterhouse
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Emotions in Immigrant
Language Education: from
Acquisition Barrier to
Affective Pedagogy
Monica Waterhouse
EMO-TISSAGE / EMO-LEARNING
Affects dans l’apprentissage des langues
Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgique, Le 5, 6, et 7 Juillet 2017
Ongoing Research Program Overarching objective: examination of the affective dimensions of adult immigrant second language education in Canada from a Deleuzian perspective. 3 angles 1. Curriculum = what to teach or content 2. Teachers’ perspectives = who teaches 3. Pedagogy = how teaching might go on
Conceptual Proliferations • Research has established the complex ways in which emotion and cognition are intimately intertwined in language learning (Arnold, 2011; Dewaele, 2013) and in the professional experience of language teaching (Benesch, 2012; Golombek & Doran, 2014). • A proliferation of theoretical perspectives with distinct strands that focus on “linguistic, psychological and social aspects of the L2 learning process” (Pavlenko, 2013, p.6). • Explicitly critical approaches (see Benesch, 2016 for a review)
Conceptual Proliferations • Anwarrudin’s (2017) discursive, materialist critique of research that frames migrant and refugee students “as emotionally vulnerable ‘problems’ in need of fixing” (p.113) • “The goal of this [critical] research is not to capture what emotions are, biologically or cognitively, or to discover whether they are good or bad for language teaching and learning, but instead to examine how they work socially” (Benesch, 2016, p.6).
What Deleuzian affect theory
does…
Resists binary oppositions (Spinoza’s monism)
“The perspective of the affects requires us
constantly to pose as a problem the relation
between actions and passions, between reason
and the emotions. We do not know in advance
what a body can do, what a mind can think –
what affects they are capable of. The
perspective of the affects requires an exploration
of these as yet unknown powers.” (Hardt, 2007,
p.x)What Deleuzian affect theory
does…
Affects:
• exceed individual bodies; they are relational
• are powers or capacities to affect and be affected, transform
(i.e. becoming, Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987)
• are visceral, preconscious, and autonomous
• may actualize in classrooms as emotions: fear, sadness, joy.
• described not in terms of what they are or what they mean for
an individual human subject (student or teacher), but are
studied in terms of what they do in the context of classroom
(Benesch, 2012) and what they produce (e.g. emotions, or
teacher pedagogical choices/responses)
• Non-human bodies (e.g. text-bodies) also affect and are
affected.Angle 1 - Curriculum • Project title: Exploring the transformative powers of Deleuzean affect in immigrant English language classrooms: curricular and pedagogical implications • Acknowledgement: funded by a Nouveaux chercheurs grant (2013-2014), Budget de développement de la recherche (BDR), Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines, Université Laval • Research Question: How is affect conceptualized in Canadian adult immigrant second language programs?
Angle 1 - Curriculum
• Identification & collection • Government websites:
of key policy and – federal for the Language
curriculum documents Instruction for Newcomers to
Canada (LINC program)
from government funded – provincial & territorial programs
immigrant official – 2012 Canadian Language
language education Benchmarks (CLB) & CLB
programs in Canada. curriculum support docs
• 30 e-documents analyzed
from 8 provinces & 2
Territories
8Angle 1 - Curriculum
Waterhouse & Mortier-Faulkner, 2014
• Psycho-cognitive orientations:
motivation and willingness to communicate
learner self-confidence and self-esteem
key role that teachers play in supporting the learning
process
• Linguistic orientations:
learning outcomes related to communicative
competence including sociocultural, pragmatic and
sociolinguistic conventions.Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
• Title: Perspectives des enseignants sur les dimensions affectives des
classes de langue pour les immigrants : implications pédagogiques et
sociales/ Teacher perspectives on the affective dimensions of
immigrant language classes: pedagogical and social implications.
• Acknowledgement: funded by Fonds de recherche du Québec sur la
société et la culture (2016-2019)
• Online questionnaire for teacher-respondents. Part of a three-year
qualitative study exploring the pedagogical choices of French and
English second language (FSL & ESL) teachers working with adult
immigrants to Canada (Québec & Ontario) with respect to the affective
dimensions of classroom life
How do the affective dimensions of their classrooms influence
these teachers’ pedagogical choices?
How do these teachers respond to affective events that present
themselves in their classrooms?Angle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
The need to develop a data collection tool aligning
theory & method:
• theoretical-methodological commensurability in
educational research on emotions (Kuby, 2016;
Zembylas, 2007b).
Tierney (2011) makes the case for vignettes in research
investigating:
• sensitive topics or ethically weighed dilemmas
• rarely occurring (not easily observable) and context-
dependent phenomena
• decision-making situationsAngle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives
• Online, vignette-based • open prompts invite
questionnaire distributed affective responses to
to teachers by Ontario four fictionalized
and Quebec teacher vignettes inspired by real-
associations via their list- life experiences of teachers
serves and social media and students involving
(e.g. facebook) affectively charged events
in adult immigrant second
• French version language classrooms
https://monicawaterhouse.limequery.c (Waterhouse, 2011)
om/431225?lang=fr
• English version
https://monicawaterhouse.limequery.c
om/239992?lang=enAngle 2 - Teachers’ Perspectives Preliminary thinking with data & theory • As suspected, emotionally charged events like the ones described in the vignettes are relatively rarely occurring. • However, when they do, they are affectively impactful within the classroom, for both teachers and students. • Teachers are responding positively to a research focus on questions of affect and are volunteering for the next phase of the study.
Angle 3 - Pedagogy
Classroom-based ethnographic research around arts-
based pedagogy (October 2017 to June 2018):
• Another component of the three-year qualitative study
exploring the pedagogical choices of teachers working with
adult immigrants to Canada with respect to the affective
dimensions of classroom life
How might an arts-based, affective pedagogy offer
teachers a way to meet the dual objectives of newcomer
language programs: language learning and integration
of immigrants?Angle 3 - Pedagogy
From acquisition barrier to affective pedagogy:
• from exclusively linguistic texts to an appreciation of art as affective
thinking and knowledge creation in the learning process (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994; Semetsky, 2009)
• from teachers’ emotional labour (Benesch, 2012) in managing
emotions to a critical reflection on the ethical-political stakes of
responses to emotions.
• from teacher-centred control to unknowablity of exactly how learning
will go on.
– “There are no ultimate or final guarantees – political, ethical,
aesthetic, pedagogic, and otherwise – that capacities to affect and
to be affected will yield an actualized next or new that is somehow
better than ‘now.’” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, pp.9-10).Angle 3 - Pedagogy Inspirations for an arts-based, affective pedagogy: • ”Exactly what forms such a pedagogy might take is to be constructed by each teacher and his/her students. To prescribe the sort of pedagogical techniques or classroom activities that teachers and students should be engaged in would be to institute another normalising discourse for teachers and students to submit to” (Zembylas, 2007a, p.343)
Choice of text
• Shaun Tan’s graphic
novel The Arrival (Cole, 2016;
Danzak, 2011)
• Affectively
powerful art
• Benefits of a
language-free
textWorking with the text
• See Cole, D. R. (2016). Affective literacy and
TEFL. Presentation slides retrieved June 12,
2017 from
https://www.slideshare.net/dracle99/affective-
literacy-and-tefl.
Cole (2016)
• Also, advantages for low literacy learnersOnwards…
You have left your readers with a very special gift: a headache.
By which I mean a problem: what in the world to do with it all.
That’s their problem. That’s where their experimentation begins.
Then the openness of the system will spread. If they have found
what they have read compelling. Creative contagion.
(Massumi, 2002, p.19)
Affective dimensions of adult immigrant
second language education in Canada
from 3 angles:
1. Curriculum
2. Teachers’ perspectives
3. PedagogyReferences
• Anwarrudin, S. M. (2017). Emotions in the curriculum of migrant and refugee students. Curriculum
Inquiry, 47(1), 112-124.
• Arnold, J. (2011). Attention to affect in language learning. Anglistik. International Journal of English
Studies, 11(1), 11-22.
• Benesch, S. (2012). Considering emotions in critical English language teaching. New York, NY:
Routledge.
• Benesch, S. (2016). Critical approaches to the study of emotions in English language teaching and
learning. In C. A. Chapelle, The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp.1-6). John Wiley & Sons. DOI:
10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1478.
• Cole, D. R. (2016). Affective literacy and TEFL. Presentation slides retrieved June 12, 2017 from
https://www.slideshare.net/dracle99/affective-literacy-and-tefl.
• Danzak, R. L. (2011). Defining identities through multiliteracies: EL teens narrate their immigration
experiences as graphic stories. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 55(3), 187-196.
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi,
Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson, & G. Burchell, Trans.). New
York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991).
• Dewaele, J.-M. (2013). Affect and language learning. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of
Applied Linguistics (pp.1-5). Blackwell Publishing. DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0011
• Golombek, P., & Doran, M. (2014). Unifying cognition, emotion, and activity in language teacher
professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 39, 102-111.
• Hardt, M. (2007). Foreword: what affects are good for. In P.T. Clough with J. Halley (Eds.), The
affective turn : theorizing the social (pp.ix-xiii). Durham & London : Duke University Press.References
• Kuby, C. R. (2016). Emotions as situated, embodied, and fissured: methodological implications of thinking
with theories. In M. Zembylas & P.A. Schutz (Eds.), Methodological advances in research on emotion
and education [e-book] (pp.125-136). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. doi: 10.1007/978-3-
319-29049-2
• Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual : movement, affect, sensation. Durham : Duke University
Press.
• Pavlenko, A. (2013). The affective turn in SLA: From ‘affective factors’ to ‘language desire’ and
‘commodification of affect.’ In D. Gabryś-Barker and J. Bielska (Eds.), The affective dimension in second
language acquisition (pp.3-28). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
• Seigworth, G. J. & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G.J. Seigworth (Eds.),
The Affect Theory Reader (pp.1-25). Duke University Press.
• Semetsky, I. (2009). Deleuze as a philosopher of education: Affective knowledge/effective learning. The
European Legacy, 14(4), 443-456.
• Tan, S. (2006). The arrival. New York : Arthur A. Levine Books, Scholastic Inc.
• Tierney, R. D. (2011, April 10). Vignettes as a complementary method in educational research. Paper
presented at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, New Orleans, LA.
• Waterhouse, M. (2011). Experiences of multiple literacies and peace: A rhizoanalysis of becoming in
immigrant language classrooms. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Ottawa. Available
electronically at http://hdl.handle.net/10393/19942
• Waterhouse, M., & Mortier-Faulkner, G. (2014, May 27). Conceptualizations of affect in Canadian adult
immigrant second language education. Paper presentation at the Canadian Association of Applied
Linguistics, Brock University, St.Catherine’s, Ontario.
• Zembylas, M. (2007a). 'Risks and pleasures: a Deleuzo-Guattarian pedagogy of desire in education',
British Educational Research Journal, 33 (3), 331-347. DOI: 10.1080/01411920701243602
• Zembylas, M. (2007b). Theory and methodology in researching emotions in education. Internationalmonica.waterhouse @lli.ulaval.ca
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