Mapping affect in critical moments of schooling for disenfranchised students

Students disenfranchised from school have something important to teach us about how the education system might be shaped more equitably. Currently, meta-narratives of student failures and pathologies prevail and are reinforced by dominant behaviourist teaching practices. In this action research project, we sought to understand how teachers might inquire with students about critical moments from their past schooling experiences. Working within Alternative Education settings, students and teachers inquired together using a variety of mediated arts-based methods. In our analysis, I-poems illuminated the power of affective spaces to shape student identities. We identified that affect and disenfranchisement were connected through lived schooling experiences of shame, exclusion and racism. In addition to critical moments, we identified there were microaggressions in the everyday of schooling experiences, and we explored the healing power of microaffirmations in student–teacher relationships through the practices of emergent listening and relational pedagogy. Students’ affective storytelling and the analysis from this research invites us to suspend our attachment to dominant behaviourist approaches and modern, industrial concepts of schooling and consider alternatives. We invite educators to consider alternative approaches to student–teacher relationships by leaning into lessons taught from students in this research.