[This entry is an archive for the seminar organized by the Doctorate of the University of Seville and the research team of the R+D+i MATILDA Project (PID2019-104557GB-I00) as part of the Doctoral Education Program.PID2019-104557GB-I00), which took place on May 19, 2021.]
In this seminar, Professor Kevin M. Leander of Vanderbild University focused on his recent work on embodied affect and literacy learning. Considering affect as a property of sets of relationships present rather than related to the individual, this approach has led him to consider how the various elements of teaching and learning assemble and separate to produce intensities in which any form of literacy or learning participates.
Privileging human intentionality or motivation, Leander posed the question, "In a given case, what conditions of possibility are occurring and for whom, and how are the participants assuming these conditions?" In an effort toward this praxis, he harnessed the possibilities of American improvisational theater to transform teacher education and literacy. This type of theater, which originated in education and social work, is at its foundation a practice of embodied attunement, collective action, emergence, and expansive world-making. Through ethnographic data and recorded responses from experimental teacher education courses he has previously taught, the professor described how the body that is moving and “moved” creates radically different and potentially more equitable opportunities for teaching and learning.
The talk concluded with reflections on the possibilities of different perspectives on the body in literacy learning, including the limitations of the (dominant) perspective of the unnecessary, interrupting, or invisible body.
The seminar was organized by the LITERACIES research group (HUM1044) and the R+D+i MATILDA research team (PID2019-104557GB-I00).
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