This research delves into the intricate intertwinements between analytical and affective approaches within the context of arts-integrated poetry education. Several researchers have emphasized the importance of integrating analytical and affective approaches, recognizing them as integral components of literary reading that mutually support each other (e.g., Felski, 2008; Xerri, 2013). Despite the acknowledgment of this symbiotic relationship, there is a notable gap in empirical studies that explore how this integration manifests within a classroom context. Furthermore, researchers point out an ambiguity between text-oriented and reader-oriented literature instruction and the ways in which different frameworks of literary theory influence teachers’ instruction (e.g., Pieper, 2020). Addressing this ambiguity is crucial to exploring alternative approaches to teaching literature that allow students to immerse themselves in literature without abandoning an analytical focus. This necessitates an approach to literature teaching that combines the analytical and the affective, acknowledging both the aesthetics of the literary text and its potential to influence and engage the reader (Felski, 2008).
One pedagogical approach to combining analytical and affective approaches in poetry teaching is arts integration. Serving as a transdisciplinary teaching approach, arts integration provides innovative opportunities for teaching poetry in combination with other art forms, such as dance or photography. The goal is to attain equal emphasis on all included art forms or subjects (e.g., Sanz Camarero et al., 2023). Arts-based approaches to teaching poetry have been scarcely researched in secondary education, and scholars call for more research (see Jusslin & Höglund, 2021). Nevertheless, recent research in primary and secondary education implies that arts integrated literature teaching can have the potential to promote both analytical and affective approaches. Studies have indicated that working with art forms, such as dance and visual art, requires close reading of literary texts and enables the incorporation of students’ voices and experiences in the teaching (Curwood & Cowell, 2011; McCormick, 2011). Given these promising gains, arts integration might provide opportunities to focus simultaneously on analytical and affective approaches in secondary poetry education.
Against this backdrop and a genuine wondering about what happens when the art forms of dance and photography are integrated with poetry teaching, this study aims to explore what this integration produces in terms of the relationship and possible friction between analytical and affective approaches in poetry education—and arts education more broadly. This exploration builds on empirical material of teaching that integrated poetry with dance and photography in upper secondary education in Finland.
The study is theoretically grounded in postfoundational theories, which oppose binaries such as body/mind, human/nonhuman, matter/discourse. As such, postfoundational theories can offer valuable perspectives in exploring what is produced in the intertwinements of analytical and affective approaches during the arts-integrated poetry lessons. In this study, we explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987/2013) concepts of smooth and striated spaces can offer opportunities to theoretically explore such intertwinements. Whereas an analytical approach to reading poetry can be understood as a striated space, which is bounded and guided by rules, (e.g., literary elements such as imagery and rhythm), an affective approach might signify the open and allowing perspective of a smooth space. Deleuze and Guattari (1987/2013) emphasize that these spaces exist only in mixture; a thought that might be productive for envisioning how the analytical and affective approaches to reading poetry might intertwine.
