ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on emotion as action in a racially and ethnically diverse English language arts classroom. We begin by conceptualizing emotion, and follow with a discussion of emotion and the body. After these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss a classroom that offered multiple and recurring iterations of the nexus of texts, bodies, and emotions, both in terms of teaching and learning. This chapter assumes that central to the subject “English” is the meaning-making work of interpreting and transforming signs. But signs are comprised of more than the literary and non-fiction texts in English classrooms. Signs also include the constructs—such as race and gender—that mediate life in the classroom, including interactional dynamics, embodied meanings, and textual practices.
