Classroom Emotions

Page 9 September–October 2008 Classroom emotions elizabeth Vogel doing emoTion: rheToriC, WriTing, TeaChing Laura R. Micciche Boynton/Cook http://www.boyntoncook.com 127 pages; paper, $18.00 In her 1998 article, “Going Postal,” Lynn Worsham , the theorist who launched a discussion of the relevance of emotion to composition, language, and education, writes, “Our most urgent political and pedagogical task remains the fundamental reeducation of emotion.” Worsham urges educators to re-evaluate the rhetorical and political nature of emotion, and explains that not doing so would continue to allow for education to “school” the culture in dominant ideology. Laura R. Micciche heeds Worsham’s call in Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching by investigating how emotion functions in the classroom, specifically in those focused on composition. Throughout emotion studies and across many disciplines, arguments abound about the degree to which emotions are cultural constructions or more universal physiological responses. Although many theorists acknowledge a socially constructed component of emotion, none can deny that emotions are also always bodily felt. Thus, scholars continue to argue back and forth about what emotion is, but Doing Emotion takes a turn away from such definitional arguments, and instead, Micciche advances the belief that scholars and instructors need to turn our attention towards what emotions do in the classroom and how they are performed. “We do emotions,” she writes, “they don’t simply happen to us.” Regardless of one’s theoretical stance, emotion has a profound effect on what happens in a classroom. For Micciche, emotion is performed in the classroom, but this performance is also rhetorical—and thus a fitting subject for rhetorical analysis. She focuses on “emotion as integral to communication, persuasion, attachments of all sorts, and to notions of self and other.” Basically, she asserts that how we talk about emotion directly affects the way emotion operates, both in terms of how we perform it and how we embody it. In the standard institutional view, students and teachers alike are supposed to operate under the illusion that they are cool, calm, and unfeeling learners—what Deborah Chappel calls “disembodied brains.” Emotion evoked by anything in the classroom must either be cloaked or restrained. But Micciche, like Worsham, makes the claim that emotion is much more complex than commonly perceived. Although critical studies of emotion and composition are beginning to appear more frequently, Micciche’s book is evidence of a paradigm shift in academia, a re-visioning of what it means to teach students . Historically, emotions have often been viewed as chaotic and dangerous and therefore unacceptable in most public environments such as the university. Feelings were thought to be essentially private and personal. Moreover, their connection to the body and their historic associations with women and minorities made them seem even more antithetical to learning and study from a traditional point of view. Given the proliferation of violent events on college campuses, such as the Virginia Tech shooting, scholarly work on emotion and the cultural climate of contemporary America are coming together to alert educators that it is no longer acceptable to see students from a pronounced emotional distance, as a set of unfeeling brains that can be trained. Rather, academics should urgently continue to research and acknowledge the role of emotion in education. Micciche interprets the increased study of emotion in English as a reaction to postmodernism’s all-consuming influence and scholars ’“exhaustion around post-modernism’s emotional cool” and denial of the importance of subjectivity and “embodied realities.” Micciche’s book is evidence of a paradigm shift in academia, a re-visioning of what it means to teach students. Micciche brings to the foreground many important ideas for pedagogy in general and composition in particular. In chapter 1, she argues that emotion is a viable subject of academic and rhetorical study and that “key claims in composition studies emerge from emotioned ways of seeing our work, no less than they do from intellectual and historical traditions.” Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the emotional attachments inherent in language, especially what she calls “sticky metaphors”: linguistically constructed identities bound by emotion, narrative tropes that continuously appear and eventually seem like fact, and emotions as a contextualized performance. Using performance as a pedagogical...