Sustaining affective resonance: Co‐constructing care in a school‐based digital design studio

Abstract

Based on two years of ethnographic engagement in a school‐based digital design studio in a high school on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, this paper conceptualizes the development and maintenance of an ethos of care in teaching and learning through sustaining affective resonance. Adopting musical metaphors as a vocabulary for affective movements, we operationalize practical and practiced methods for sustaining (actively extending) affective (care‐giving and care‐taking intensities) resonance (shared meaning making and cultural production). Sharing examples across years, we show the specific ways that mentors and students in the digital design studio built and nurtured care‐full practices. The purpose of the paper is to explicate the development and enactment of mentoring practices that we observed in the design studio and then to consider how these practices might be shared, spread, and adapted across contexts of teaching and learning.

Moments of friction in virtual reality: How feeling histories impact experience

“…As de la Bellacasa (2017) writes,[p]ositioning for care emerges as an oppositional practice that both creates trouble in the democratic assembly of articulate concerns as well as generates possibility: it reminds us of exclusion and suffering and fosters affective involvements with the becomings of science and technology. (26)This study of feeling histories and frictions, to conclude, points toward the need for “care-full” designs, or intimate, localized, co-created immersive experiences (Phillips and Killian Lund, 2019). Through our MIA of Dale, Emile, and Maria’s experiences in TFF , we became attuned to the power dynamics evident in the kind of design intervention we produced—which led to inequitable access for learners.…”

Sustaining Textual Passions: Teaching With Texts Youth Love

“…This brings up some considerations about the agency of BIPOC youth as it relates to the theorization of dampening. In Phillips and Lund's (2019) use of affective resonance, they focus on how adult mentors "[removed] barriers that would halt vibration" (p. 1536). Identified barriers were school structures, such as teachers' goals for use of student time or institutional expectations around using or being present in certain spaces.…”

“…Karis, Scott, and the special education teacher, Hailey, checked in informally on a day-to-day basis, and Karis and Scott debriefed formally at the end of each microcycle to analyze our positionality and emerging tensions between youth and adults, including monitoring student progress with the guiding pedagogical goals and making necessary changes to determine what was working and what needed to be improved. We also privileged youth voices in the design and redesigning process, collecting survey responses and focal group conversations about the design of the course in the redesigning process.Following the procedures detailed byPhillips and Lund's (2019) study, we picked the end-of-class focus group conversations as a point of entry, focusing on questions around what moments were exciting for the class versus what moments were disappointing or deadening. Drawing from recalled moments of passion or disappointment during the focus group conversations (see the appendix for the focus group question protocol), we chose a youth-selected fandom that emerged in both focus group conver-…”

Affective potentials in informal technology‐enhanced learning settings

“…Section authors make timely theoretical and practical contributions that pivot away from “major” issues of the technologies embedded within these settings, or the design principles that inform them, in favor of the “minor” energies that course through them and thereby enable them to persist (or not, see Phillips & Killian Lund, ) across space and over time. That is, they focus less on mobile devices, or making or virtual reality—although these “major” areas are embedded within—in favor of how people, things and feelings resonate (Phillips & Killian Lund, ), how they reassemble (Bell, Taylor, Riesland, & Hays, ) and how they foment dissensus (Rowsell & Shillitoe, ) in order to produce and sustain change. In the end, the articles in this special issue are attuned to how hegemony is both secured and disrupted and can “mobilize a lithe and powerful response able to resist, rework, and undo those social relations and practices” (Katz, , p. 599).…”