Disrupting rules of emotion in an urban English classroom

Purpose This study aims to focus on the regulation of emotions in critical literacy, its resulting racial oppression and students’ response to emotional control. The authors examine a student discussion of a poem, looking specifically at the affective responses of students’ interactions as these open possibilities for identifying ways that students confront, resist and subvert emotional control. This research question asks how students resisted limited forms of emotion and enabled opportunities for varied affective forms of engagement. Design/methodology/approach In this analysis, the authors explored both emotions and discourse (broadly defined as languages, actions, embodied acts, etc.) as they construct the flow of activity in this discussion. The authors also looked at past familiar practices that make the present one recognizable and meaningful. Findings The findings indicate black students resisted emotion rules by discussing racism, a highly taboo subject in schools. Students also rallied against an interpretation that felt as a distraction, an attempt to negate or shut down the naming and sensing of racism in the poem and in the classroom. Despite the constant regulation of emotions before, during and after the discussion, black youth firmly indicated their right to judge the interpretation that the poem had nothing to do with racism as inadequate and steeped in whiteness. Originality/value In schools, critical literacy often fails to attend to how emotions are managed and reflect racial control and dominance. For critical literacy as an anti-oppressive pedagogy to confront the oppressive status quo of schools, it must no longer remain silent or leave unquestioned rules of emotional dispositions that target marginalized students.