Repositioning Emotion, Learning, and Difference with First-Year Writers

Abstract

Drawing upon three individual interviews with each of five students enrolled in a first-year writing (FYW) course I observed throughout a semester, this dissertation explores how a group of socially privileged students emotionally experienced, interpreted, and responded to discourses of differences encountered in their FYW course. Contributing to the fields of writing studies (composition and rhetoric), education studies, educational psychology, and discourse analysis, my research reveals that significant conceptual shifts occur through complex experiences of emotional friction; emotions cause friction, and friction is the site where learning happens. I argue that emotions can support learning, as they can prompt new ways of thinking, and/or emotions can impede learning, as they keep students attached to the limited perspectives afforded by familiar positionalities. Consequently, FYW classes must prioritize emotion-oriented inquiry if we intend to support our students’ successful interpretation, navigation, and composition of exigence-driven rhetorics inside our classrooms, in other courses, and in the world beyond institutions of higher learning.

My research focuses on emotion and learning vis à vis difference; as such, this study offers insights on how emotion may function when advantaged FYW students engage with discourses across lines of social and/or ideological differences. Additional data sources supporting my research include Perceptions of Controversial Topics surveys completed by focal participants and whole class Emotion Scales surveys administered at various points in the term. My findings illustrate how emotions can frustrate learning through students’ deficit framing, disengagement cycles, motivation from a sense of obligation, and aversion to the discomfort that always arises in learning. Conversely, emotions can facilitate learning when students cultivate more realistic assessments of themselves as writers and prioritize a sense of self-authorship in the choices they make while completing coursework. I found that leveraging emotional momentum occurs when students actively experience the positive synergies of engagement, the affective deposits offered by others and themselves, and the blissful rewards that manifest upon enduring the dissonance of learning.

I contend that, for these students, emotions functioned in complex ways to support and impede learning in FYW by stabilizing and destabilizing meanings, sometimes simultaneously. My analysis reveals how emotions were deep-rooted in these students’ social group affiliations, yet students are often unable to perceive how prevailing cultures reproduce their specific ideologies through their constituents’ emotional labor. Centering emotion as a dominant-but-underappreciated force in human communication can enable FYW students to engage in deeper analyses of the arguments they encounter, to reflect on ways their own and others’ positionalities simultaneously support and constrain critical thinking, and to gain vital insights about how social meanings are circulated. If we pay attention to emotions as instructors and help our students to pay attention to their own and others’ emotions, we can offer them a paradigm-shifting and potentially life-changing capacity to leverage the power of emotion.