Walking with stories is an experiment that evokes and provokes by juxtaposing researcher wonderings with language teachers’ accounts of emotionally charged events from their work with newcomers. This non-representational technique examines material and affective relations, and intimates the becomings happening in these classrooms and in the process of doing research.
At the heart of this presentation are stories shared by language teachers working with newcomers. These stories recount emotionally charged classroom events and were gathered anonymously via an online, vignette-based questionnaire. It sought to explore how teachers respond to the affective dimensions of life in adult immigrant language classrooms. Walking with these stories is an experiment that epistemologically reframes how research goes on and what it might produce: “The walker draws a tale from impressions on the ground. … His knowledge is not classificatory but storied, not totalising and synoptic but open-ended and exploratory” (Ingold, 2015, p.48). Thus, the prepositional doubling in my title rhetorically signals two coextensive aims. Stories of affective becomings offer insights into the diverse ways in which affect may actualize in the context of language teaching and learning (Benesch, 2012). At the same time, stories as affective becomings suggests a methodological commitment to non-representational research as an immanent encounter yielding indeterminate future becomings, rather than a faithful representation of that which has already happened (Vannini, 2015, p.12). Performatively juxtaposing teacher stories with researcher wonderings evokes “through provocative fragments, rather than just reporting and illustrating through representative units” (Vannini, 2015, p.120). Epistemologically, walking with teacher stories aligns with non-representational theories and techniques that privilege the study of material relations involving human and non-human elements, “organic matter and material objects” (Vannini, 2015, p.8). With respect to classroom events, a materialist perspective enables an examination of “affect as a capacity to be moved and be affected, and the body’s capacity to move and affect other people and other things” (Vannini, 2015, p.9). These dynamic forces elude naming and capture in language, but still intimate the continual (and sometimes risky) becomings that go on in language classrooms and in the process of doing applied linguistics research.
