Moving, feeling, desiring, teaching

Introduction: Moving, Feeling, Desiring, TeachingGail BoldtIn an essay written shortly before her death, the French social theorist and early childhood researcher Liane Mozere (2014) joined a reflection on her long friendship with Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze with thoughts about teaching and learning in classrooms. For Mozere, because learning always addresses desire, it does not have to do with what happens when children master the official curriculum; rather, learning happens in moments that leak through curriculum when the children are able to snatch something that empowers their own "forces of life" (Mozere, 2014, p. 102). Although these are not the learning moments envisioned in planned curriculum, they are nevertheless intimately connected to the immediacy and the context of the classroom. Mozere compares this immediacy to learning to swim, when the swimmer is able to abandon what she knows about movement on land. The more the swimmer is able to immerse herself in the specificity of being in the water, the more she is able to increase the power of her actions. For Mozere, the ability to increase the power and intensity of our actions-always actions that speak to and from desire-is learning. This learning happens in classrooms all the time, just as it happens in every space of human occupation, and the curriculum may be part of what sets the stage for this learning, or it may interfere with the learning, or it may be irrelevant. But always part of the landscape of our learning, even if not obviously present, are others. "Private affairs merge with immediate, social and political issues. . . . We are always with others, even if this is not recognized" (Mozere, 2014, p. 103, citing Deleuze, 1990.)For Mozere (2014), relationships are not themselves learning, but rather bring things to us that "read[y] us for illuminations and intensities of experience" (p. 100). Mozere describes her friendship with Guattari and Deleuze as an "aquarium" in which "words floated around" and a "jungle" in which "paths were discovered" (p. 100). She names the feeling of their being together-sharing meals, rowing on ponds, listening to music, playing cards, and talking-as something important that was always coming toward her, or in other words, as creating the conditions of potential which ignited desire and set the unique trajectories of learning into motion for each of them. "If it was not a teaching, or a learning pattern," Mozere says, "then it was obviously about another way of being in politics, and that is, in life" (p. 101).Writing this shared essay on affect, emotion, and movement gave us-the three authors-a renewed condition of potential for imagination and desire. We have been friends for many years, and the vagaries of our lives bring us into and out of collaboration. To borrow from Mozere, even when it is not obvious or immediately recognized, we are deeply ingrained in one another's landscapes of affect, learning, and teaching. Importantly, however, our collaboration does not give rise to a single program or road map, nor even to a single focus. Looking across these three essays, readers will find that we view these topics through different theoretical lenses, which lead to differences in the ways we think about affect (the registration on the body of being affected by something, whether consciously or unconsciously) and emotion (the meaning we attribute to affect). These are differences we consider felicitous. As Mozere describes, while learning is always done in the landscape of others, it is also singular in that we each uniquely articulate learning through our own experiences and commitments. We each must answer to our own desire. Rather than imagining that we best serve ourselves or our readers by articulating a unified version of what a focus on affect and emotion might mean for literacy education, teacher education, or classroom life, we draw from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective that laying our differences side-by-side creates a new set of relations and possibilities. …