When the Tears Just Pop Out of Your Eyes: Reconfiguring Social-Classed Literacies through a Posthuman Teacher Education Pedagogy

Abstract

This chapter draws on theories of new materialisms that assume the discursive (language, ideology, emotions) and the material (physical space, material objects, bodies) are always entangled and act together to produce phenomena. We use these theoretical concepts to persuade readers that the ways we perceive, judge, and discriminate based on social-class difference are literacies that we acquire and produce across time and space. The authors argue that these literacies are acquired by the body through our material-discursive intra-actions and are often felt viscerally, even when we don't have access to language appropriate for articulating what we know. We use vignettes from teacher education courses to support a call for tending to the body, space, social-classed texts, and emotions in the design of curriculum and pedagogy aimed at approaches to teaching and learning that are sensitive to social class.

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