6.1: "Feeling Lore-" The "Problem" of Emotion in the Practice of Teaching

Aligning criticality with thinking and consciousness with discourse has often had the unfortunate effect of maintaining the displacement of affect from the process of learning to write. Early critics of emotion in composition leveraged their social models against cognitivism, which, they claimed, ignored the impacts of language for the biology of emoting. Even so, while early cognitivist investigations of emotion have fallen out of favor for social-constructivist views of emotion as situated, Alice Brand’s original message from those investigations that “[o]ur students need to be familiar with both the emotional and intellectual cues they experience that tell them they are ready to write, ready to stop, and ready to do a number of things in between” is as true and valid as ever (1985/1986, p. 11). The terms we use to explore these cues have changed, and compositionists such as Laura Micchie, Susan McLeod and Lynn Worsham have asked us to re-examine early dismissals of emotion by critical pedagogues who did not find appeals to biology compelling. These women have attempted to reconcile early biology-based conceptions of affect with newer theories of discursive construction and social conditioning. Their scholarship has helpfully created a new wave of attention to emotion within composition studies, but it has often done so at the cost of entertaining the body as an agentive emoter, a feature of contemplative writing pedagogies. This is a point I will develop in the next section. For now, I’d like to focus on what should trouble us all: even with a surge of new scholarship on the discipline and maintenance of our affective lives, the traditionalist contrast between reason and emotion continues to resonate in our teaching practices and the lore surrounding our discipline. If lore reflects a physical enactment of our theories, our teaching literally embodies the dismissal of emotion, and, with it, the writing body from our classrooms—no matter if we approach these from the lens of discourse or biology.

If we understand lore to account not only for the dissemination of knowledge in our field, but also the production of it, as Patricia Harkin calling upon Stephen North does (1991, p. 125), the persistent denigration of emotion as reason’s inferior (female) mate is extremely concerning. If our rituals and practices of teaching writing do not account for the emotional experience of writing, learning and meaning-making, we do ourselves and our students a great disservice and justify the suppression of the body in composition studies. “Bringing lore to light” (Harkin, 1991, p. 138) can show us what works in the classroom and give needed merit to the embodied labor of teaching, but it also exposes the fault lines between our practice and developing theory. In this case, how recent efforts to theorize constructive models of engaging students’ and teachers’ emotions as part of the work validated and valued in the writing classroom have not yet revolutionized these classrooms—classrooms that in reality may be producing knowledge counter to those recent, progressive theories of affect. I argued in the last chapter that our situated knowledge, informed by our experiences, can be used as a means of making critical the integration of personal, embodied evidence and social analysis in the writing classroom. Here, I contend that the lore regarding the validity of emotional experience in pursuits of learning is a negative example of how collective accounts, themselves a kind of coalitional, situated knowledge, are always at work in our teaching spaces. We must be mindful of their lived presence and effects if we hope to change them—why I take the time here to explicitly recognize their deleterious effects.

I was reminded of the distance between our practice and our theory in a recent conversation with a colleague whom I believe is a very motivated and engaging teacher. As we shared tales of memorable classroom experiences, nostalgic at the end of yet another semester, my colleague noted that a student had recently cried in her presence. When I asked her how she responded, she looked genuinely confused and claimed that she “ignored it and did nothing” as if that were the only appropriate response available. Others on the periphery of our conversation nodded in a kind of compassionate agreement with her. This colleague seemed shocked to hear me tell stories of teaching encounters that validated and perhaps even encouraged student emotion, sharing moments when I hugged a student in distress and when I invited another student on the verge of tears over his lackluster performance on an essay and extenuating personal circumstances (his parents were divorcing) to my office to talk through his feelings and frustrations.

My colleague’s surprise is understandable when placed against the larger backdrop of my department. Regularly included on the litany of instructors’ complaints is students’ insistence on bringing up their feelings in class. I hear often an echo of “I don’t care what my students’ feel; I just want them to think.” When I hear this frustrated response, I must admit that I hear teachers’ emotion, unacknowledged, short-circuiting valuable moments of potential learning so that rather than feeling empathy for the teacher, I tend to feel sympathy for students. It has always been curious to me how this complaint hides the ways students are articulating analytical thinking—using the language they have at hand, which often includes emotive discourse—but aren’t being heard. Teachers’ tend not to listen because of their own indoctrination in and gatekeeping of dominant pedagogies reliant on emotion’s absent-presence, to borrow Worsham’s language. Worsham argues that the absent-presence of feeling is perpetuated because we are taught a limited means of emotional expression and identification. Such silencing of emotion, guaranteed by our limited vocabulary, is a primary form of “pedagogic violence” meant to uphold the partriarchal status quo (Worsham, 2001, p. 240). Evoking the writing body, feelings become a “phantom limb” we must learn to suffer in silence (Worsham, 2001, pp. 247-251). The violence of a sundered limb highlights how we are unable to “adequately apprehend, name, and interpret [our] affective lives” and thus are left to view emotion as a private, dangerous and mysterious threat to public reason (Worsham, 2001, p. 240). The invited and critical expression of emotions is, then, an inherently a feminist endeavor and is fruitful ground for contemplative writing pedagogies.

But like the phantom limb that contradicts its non-presence when it tingles with pain, emotional expressions often do occur in our classrooms and offices, even if they are uninvited. I’ve heard colleagues label these moments as “outbursts,” criticized on the grounds that they are only too telling of students’ limited analytical powers, which makes students overly reliant on emotional cliché and performance. This pat response is best unpacked through Dawn Skorczewski’s analysis of student writing, which investigates why students’ beginning written discourse is often a hybrid blend of cliché and critical analysis. Cliché doesn’t mean our students aren’t thinking, Skorczewski claims as she examines student writing, only that they are using the ordinary language available to them to express those thoughts. Important to my analysis here, Skorczewski’s notes that the clichés students use are often emotionally-loaded. Skorczewski’s advice regarding teachers’ reactions to student cliché might, in turn, be helpful to consider when approaching emotional discourse in our writing classes. Skorczewski’s reminds us that “critical thought [may be] a kind of safe house for [teachers] in the same way that cliché can be for our students” (2000, p. 234). In other words, we judge our students’ conceptions and expressions of their inner selves based on the ways we have ourselves been taught to mistrust personal and emotional language in favor of the discursive certainty of the poststructuralist self. As we acknowledge students’ “lack of familiarity with how emotions work, we need to recall ways in which faculty embody or fail to embody critical emotional literacy as they situate themselves within the disciplinary culture of their fields” (Winans, 2012, p. 154). It would therefore be a greater critical (and feminist) gesture for us to revise our pedagogical rules and view awareness of our emotional positioning as a teachable skill in the writing classroom than for us to simply dismiss feeling altogether or write it off as clichéd and meaningless. Simply recognizing the flippant manner with which we approach student emotion is a step in the right direction: “the teacher who acknowledges the beliefs she brings to the conversation is equipped to listen to her students more carefully than the teacher who holds her beliefs so closely that she can no longer see them as beliefs” (Skorczewski, 2000, p. 236).

Here, following Skorczewski’s gesture of rhetorical listening, I am interested in what changes when we begin to apply mindfulness to student emotion, viewing it not only as a readily-accessible discourse, as a feature of ordinary language, but also as a legitimate, embodied and critical engagement in the learning process—as a staple of the embodied imagination. In the next interchapter, I explore how contemplative pedagogy provides us a means of engaging student emotion and validating it as a generator of writing and meaning. When we begin to legitimate emotion, it seems to me that we open up our discussions of critical thinking to include feeling and thereby start to carve out new means of emotional expression, pulling it back into the ordinary language of classroom talk. Mindful discussion of emotion is necessary for us to create an environment where metacognition is a necessary and teachable feature of the writing process, as monitoring and controlling one’s thoughts requires both motivation and continued effort, both of which are affective in nature. As Fleckenstein notes, we must talk to our students about how “much of writing consists of explosive moments of conflict … balanced—if we are lucky—by mystifying moments of flow” (1997, p. 28). In addition, we might also talk about the joy and pleasure of writing with our students. In the next section, I suggest that the concepts of “situated feeling” within contemplative writing pedagogy can help us perform this important work of recognizing the rhetorical and material effects of feeling.