ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on recent research in both psychology and neurosciences to explore how the simultaneously intimate, but public, reality of emotion influences how one understand literacy experiences and construct literate identities. Emotion is not always a subject people are comfortable discussing. What's more, only certain performances of emotion are regarded as acceptable. Expressions of emotion not part of dominant cultural norms can be used to exclude people, such as sentimentality being read as feminine and irrational. Emotion is a concept employed to mean many different things. The interactions between emotion and memory reinforce the power of strong emotional experiences in the conception of self and construction of the dispositions. To consider teaching as emotional experiences also can mean a critical consideration of the institutions in school, such as the grade at the end of an assignment, which shape the emotional experience of the entire learning process.
