Comments on: Teaching and bad affect https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2016/12/04/teaching-and-bad-affect/ critical anthropology of academic culture Wed, 08 Nov 2017 19:41:39 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.1 By: eli https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2016/12/04/teaching-and-bad-affect/#comment-11978 Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:04:31 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=2280#comment-11978 In reply to Lauren.

Thanks, Lauren, “cheesy is better than disaffected” sounds like words to live by! There’s so much that’s shaped by how people hold their bodies, etc, it would be nice to try some of these exercises to interrupt the norms. I actually started out this class the first day by having the kids go outside the classroom on a sort of cultural scavenger hunt, but I never came up with a good reason to do that again, alas.

Perhaps I could ask my students to come up with their own movement exercises to enact the course material 🙂

]]> By: Lauren https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2016/12/04/teaching-and-bad-affect/#comment-11977 Sun, 04 Dec 2016 18:52:01 +0000 http://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=2280#comment-11977 I really liked this essay and so much of it resonates with me, especially the part about how hard it is to connect when students don’t like reading. I have a sort of weird left-field suggestion of you are interested, that comes from my background doing democratic education with adults and also especially with children. I think what you wrote about the classroom itself is especially important, and one way of thinking about this is to think about the way that affect lives in bodies. Finding ways to change the ways that bodies inhabit the classroom can be a powerful way to support better affect for everyone. “Games for actors and non-actors” by Boal is the canonical “theater of the opressed” resource for physical exercises that can help students bring their bodies into the work of analyzing politics/history/etc. A lot of them feel really cheesy but sometimes cheesy is better than disaffected. I have found that moving around together helps people feel more trust and presence in an environment.

]]>