The Third-Grade Classroom is Leaking: Children, Affect, and the Mundane
In this research project, I resist the dominant perspectives of children’s learning as a process of development and consider learning as momentary, relational encounters with others. I will discuss my year-long, ethnographic study in a third-grade classroom in which I engaged with children’s learning by attending to their seemingly mundane ways of thinking, making, and doing that hold significance for them yet go unnoticed or fail to register as being important or meaningful. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically their conceptualization of affect and the body without organs, I invoke the concept of leaking as a strategy to become attuned to children’s mundane learning and activities that tend to be minimized or overlooked in relation to dominant orientations and understandings of children’s art and learning.
Advisers/Committee
