Emphasis on communication in classrooms has radically changed curriculum policy and classroom practice over the last half-century. New pedagogies that stress ‘think aloud’ practices are now quite common in STEM classrooms in the U.S., where students are asked to explain what they were thinking as they worked on a task. These strategies are also prevalent in reading instruction where they are referred to as ‘languaging’ (Swain, 2006). According to Hwang and Roth (2011), however, the typical classroom task of recounting or explaining one’s thinking—on demand and supposedly after the fact of thinking—fails to capture the complex embodied nature of communication: ‘There is not first thought, which is then emptied out into the public. Speakers find out about their thinking as much as listeners.”(p. 29). According to this approach, ‘the living body constitutes the mediating hub in communication; my body is my expression rather than merely a tool for expressing what is in my mind’ (p. 29). In attending to sensory modalities—gesture, intonation, appearance, etc – we begin to grasp how the relationship between thought and language escapes conventional theories of communication (Vygotsky, 1986). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994) allow us to push this approach further, attending to the non-human forces as well, so that we might begin to study new assemblages of thought and language. They critique the logic of communication and its requisite binaries of sender/receiver or signal/noise or content/message, and offer instead a physics of intensities, of affective-material assemblages. The human body may be a hub, but it is not a Humanist hub. Drawing on philosophers such as Spinoza and Bergson, they argue for the radical ‘externality of thought’. This approach to the nature of thought allows us to study the materiality of language in new ways. We are able to push back at the totalizing eye of linguistics and other discourse frameworks that code all classroom activity in terms of communication models. This presentation takes up these ideas and applies them to three different case studies, analyzing video classroom data from U.S. middle schools.

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