Writing About Affect in Education Research Articles

Tiffany Sikorski and Lama JaberScience Education Research SeminarUniversity of Maryland, College Park

Nov. 8th, 2012

The Clip• 5th grade class from the Learning Progressions Project•Magnet school for Communications•At the last science class: controversy over whether the sun has a

magnetic core that attracts the planets• In this clip: students are discussing the Puddle Question (What happens

to a puddle that disappears over the course of the day), and the role of heat/heat sources

Focal Questions• Do you see affect?

• How can you articulate what you are seeing?

Kinds of claims about affect• What is the mood/atmosphere of classroom?• What are students puzzled about/trying to figure out?• Are students engaged/interested in the discussion?• What ideas are students trying to express? How are they trying to express those ideas? (i.e. performativity, expressiveness, and display)•“Inquiry styles” (Lindfors, 1999)

What our writing needs to accomplish1. Convey to the reader our claims about affect

2. Provide evidence that readers can use to evaluate our claims

Where these goals potentially intersect

In order for the reader to EVALUATE OUR CLAIMS about affect, we must do a really good job CONVEYING OUR CLAIMS about affect in the first place.

Conveying claimsabout affect is not trivial

In writing up our fine-grained analysis of video, we often resort to “dry”, “mechanical”, “cold”, or “academic” language—is that really doing our claims about affect justice?

An example of dry, academic language“…in class B we can identify 25 episodes of positive emotional reactions, such as joy

and satisfaction, that contributed to the construction of a friendly climate between

the teacher and students and increased the affective proximity between them. This

number represents an average of 0.6 positive emotional events per lesson in class B.

Episodes of this same nature have a much lower frequency of occurrence in class A,

with a total of 10 events during the 32 lessons, which means 0.3 events per lesson in

average.” How emotions shape the relationship between a chemistry teacher and her high school students (Maria, dos Santos, & Mortimer, 2011, p. 1104).

Hannula (2003)“I will present the case study of one student, illustrating her anxiety with mathematics and how it influences her interaction with her teacher.

I want to increase the intensity of the reading experience and the lifelikeness of the story, therefore I shall include an inner monologue of the student, writing it in the first person and in the present tense, as a stream of consciousness.” (p. 32)

Brainstorming… - Novelists, poets, and even some academics

- masters of representing human emotion in words - Neuroscience of empathy

- understanding how we process information about emotions and feelings - Food Styling

- Showing the truth by photographing a lie- Creative/Narrative nonfiction

- Telling the truth in an engaging way - Documentary photography

- When words are not necessary

Food Styling“But what my ingenious friend was up to was this: bringing the truth of those meals to a flat page, trying with every tool at her disposal to fool the eyes and thence the taste buds of tens of thousands of magazine readers and moviegoers into perceiving the delicious truth of an actual meal, when to simply photograph the actual meal would result in a kind of lie, rendering a magnificent creation as limpish and ugly arrangement of soulless foods." (Roorbach, 2001, p. 1)

Motor oil

Literary Techniques- choice of tense

- false starts

- trailing off

- expressive language

- voice

- metaphor and analogy

- flashbacks

- inner talk, reflection

- “as if” phrasing (Barone, 2008)

- synechdoche

- imagery

- word choice

- narrative arcs

- scenes & “The Yellow Test” (Gutkind, 2012)

Reading ListBarone, T. (2008). Creative nonfiction and social research. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, Methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 105-116). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gutkind, Lee. (2012). You can’t make this stuff up: The complete guide to writing creative nonfiction—from memoir to literary journalism and everything in between. Philadelphia, PA: De Capo Press.

Hannula, M. S. (2003). Fictionalizing experiences: Experiencing through fiction. For the Learning of Mathematics, 23(3), 31-37.

Roorbach, B. (2001). Contemporary creative nonfiction: The art of truth. New York, NY: OUP.