ABSTRACT
This chapter characterizes the learning that is expressed during responses like Lucy's as feeling the text. It conceptualizes emotion as a layer that deepens literacies learning and validates and exposes the complexities of challenging texts. Feeling the text allows students to get closer to the experiences and emotions of characters and inhabit, even temporarily and vicariously, their experiences. Although emotions have traditionally been perceived to be objects of control in schools, the chapter explores the ways in which emotions can be used to circulate stories into and out of classrooms and broader communities. It conceptualize this process of bringing stories in from the community and moving stories out into the community as mobilizing emotion. Mobilizing emotion into communities can promote agency for students and teachers. Emotion plays a mediating role in classrooms where students are reading challenging texts; there are affordances and challenges of feeling texts in classrooms.
