Disrupting rules of emotion in an urban English classroom

Abstract

Purpose: Our study focuses on regulation of emotions in critical literacy, its resulting racial oppression, and students’ response to emotional control. We examine a student discussion of a poem, looking specifically at the affective responses of students’ interactions as these open possibilities for identifying ways that students confront, resist, and subvert emotional control. Our research question asks how students resisted limited forms of emotion and enabled opportunities for varied affective forms of engagement.

Approach: In our analysis, we explored both emotions and discourse (broadly defined as language, actions, embodied acts, etc.) as they construct the flow of activity in this discussion. We also looked at past familiar practices which make the present one recognizable and meaningful.

Findings: Findings indicate black students resisted emotion rules by discussing racism, a highly taboo subject in schools. Students also rallied against an interpretation that felt as distraction, an attempt to negate or shut down the naming and sensing of racism in the poem and in the classroom. Despite the constant regulation of emotions before, during and after the discussion, black youth firmly indicated their right to judge the interpretation that the poem had nothing to do with racism as inadequate and steeped in whiteness.

Originality and value: In schools, critical literacy often fails to attend to how emotions are managed and reflect racial control and dominance. In order for critical literacy as an anti-oppressive pedagogy to confront the oppressive status quo of schools, it must no longer remain silent or leave unquestioned rules of emotional dispositions that target marginalized students.