ABSTRACT
This chapter describes our affective reading experience as teacher-researchers and explores one book’s pedagogical potential to be used, and to act, in adult language classrooms through a materialist lens. Theory-practice encounters signal a dynamic relation in which theory is a toolbox that has to work in practice. In educational settings, theory-practice means that teacher-researchers are always thinking with theory and that theory underpins how teacher-researchers understand classroom life. The chapter discusses materialism more generally to show its usefulness for thinking about specific challenges in adult language education. It focuses on text-bodies, otherwise known as teaching materials. Materialist teaching-learning involves continual experimentation, ongoing becomings in responses to problems emerging from classroom life. The World Wide Web demanded ever more complex, multimodal, and critical reading practices. Contemporary global problems—from environmental crises, to financial system failures, to terrorism—are destabilizing human hubris on multiple fronts.
