Over the past decade or so, there has been a growing interest in the role of affect within educational contexts (e.g. Niccolini, Dernikos, Lesko & McCall, 2018; Zembylas, 2014). This change in focus is part of a much broader paradigmatic shift within the humanities and the social sciences, often referred to as the affective turn (e.g. Clough & Halley, 2007; Massumi, 2002), which foregrounds the importance of the body and affective experience. Alongside this philosophically rooted drive to acknowledge the centrality and potentiality of the body as an inherent part of the learning process, there are pragmatic concerns amongst educationalists and psychologists around how to maximise affective engagement within contemporary classrooms (e.g. see Wang & Degol, 2014). This move towards the development of psychopedagogies which seek to maximise children’s emotional states in order to improve performance has been criticised as positioning children as ‘psychologically susceptible’, ‘emotionally irrational’ and ‘socially manipulable’ objects as part of a broader biopolitical agenda (Williamson, 2016). Within this paper we do not seek to explore how we might manipulate students’ emotions in order to maximise engagement; rather we explore the inherently affective force of particular subject disciplines, and the potentialities which these might bring to the learner as agent rather than object. We are therefore making a distinction between affective pedagogy, which we refer to here as ways of teaching that are designed to innervate particular emotional states, and affective knowledge, which refers to aspects of knowledge or knowing which seem to organically bring forth particular emotions.

Recent work has differentiated between achievement emotions (Hall, Sampasivam, Muis & Ranellucci, 2016; Pekrun and Perry, 2014), which occur in response to completion of a learning task, and epistemic emotions (Brun, Doğuoğlu, & Kuenzle, 2008), which emerge in response to the generation of knowledge itself. For example, while a sense of pride might arise from the satisfaction that comes from completion of the task itself, a sense of surprise, curiosity or confusion might result from learning something unexpected (Kang et al., 2009). This distinction between achievement and epistemic emotions may be usefully applied when attempting to separate affective characteristics of the learning environment versus affective characteristics of the subject discipline itself.

Within this study we focus on grammar learning as a test example. We will argue that, native grammar carries a strong affective charge, drawing upon our experiences of teaching explicit grammar knowledge to student teachers over a two-year period. During this project, we were struck by students’ affective responses to learning grammar: both positive and negative. We observed that while attitudes to grammar seemed to be predominantly negative at the beginning of the course, many of our students reported having changed their minds about grammar by the end, to the point where they were keen to spread the word to others. Within this paper, we explore the possible reasons for this apparent shift in attitudes and the meanings that the students attribute to their experiences of learning grammar. Our analysis centres around the following questions:

-        What are the specific satisfactions of learning grammar?

-        What can we learn about the role of affect in learning more generally?

We make connections between our data and key idea ideas around affect – particularly those developed by Massumi (2002) after Deleuze and Guattari (1988) – as well as recent work in psychology around epistemic emotions. In this way, we attempt to innervate current conceptualisations around the nature and value of grammar knowledge and make important observations about the role of affect in learning more generally.

The study adopts an exploratory qualitative approach to the investigation of students’ affective responses to learning grammar. The main body of the data drawn upon within the current paper comes from a series of semi-structured group interviews with student teachers who attended a series of optional grammar courses (groups of 1 to 10; n=22). The interview questions were initially very broad, allowing students to talk about the things that felt most pertinent to them about their experiences of learning grammar. As the project progressed and we were struck by the strong affective component both within the sessions and the interviews, we began to narrow the focus of the interviews to explore this dimension in further depth. Field notes were also made throughout each iteration of the course, to support us in capturing our impressions of the students’ and our own affective responses to the sessions. Each short course consisted of 5-8 sessions of two hours each and attracted numbers of 20-50 students (a total of 80 attendees). Our analysis was necessarily inductive in nature, given that the affective dimension of learning explicit grammar knowledge is understudied, and there are consequently insufficient grounds for the development of predetermined hypotheses (Bunt, 2018). As an initial starting point, we began by extracting key themes relating to students’ experiences of learning grammar. We then went on to explore the connections between the emerging categories (Braun and Clarke, 2006) and considered the possible generative mechanisms that underpin students’ experiences (Blaikie, 1993). The coding served as an initial mechanism for familiarisation with the data and beginning to collate similar experiences, feelings and ideas. After this initial coding of the data, we moved away from the rigidity of the codes to engage more freely with the data, making connections between the students’ accounts, our own emerging ideas and a range of theoretical perspectives. While the initial coding served as an initial clearing ground, enabling us to make the wealth of data manageable and allow initial senses (and sensations) around the data to emerge, the second stage allowed us to move away from the relatively banal process of categorisation (Maclure, 2010) to a more productive analytical process of connecting the data with ideas and theoretical perspectives relating to affect and epistemic emotions.

Our results demonstrate the potential of grammar as an unexpected source of wonder and excitement within the classroom, providing an important counter-narrative to the predominantly negative discourse around explicit grammar teaching. Our work also provides important insights in relation to the role of affect in learning more generally. Psychological accounts of affect and learning tend to focus on the conditions required to put learners into states of arousal conducive to efficient processing of information. Within our study, however, the subject matter itself seemed to play a key role in the emergence of relational intensities between the subject discipline and the learner, which did much more than this. Rather than simply making students more efficient and susceptible to learning, the high levels of affect seemed to generate both ‘towardness’ and ‘awayness’ (Ahmed, 2004). These propulsive affects seemed to emerge through interaction between the subject and the learner, leading us to ask whether sufficient attention is given to the role of affective knowledge (versus affective pedagogy) within education. We are of course not suggesting that pedagogy is irrelevant, nor that it is a bad idea to plan lessons which are interactive and engaging; rather we suggest that consideration of the intrinsic value and capacity for wonder of a particular subject might provide a more authentic engagement, where students feel empowered to invest in their own learning and compelled to share their discoveries with others. Our findings suggest that it is important for us to explore the potentiality of the subject to generate high levels of affect, rather than focussing on pedagogical techniques which aim to whip up arousal out of nowhere.

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