The importance of affect: enjoyment, responsiveness, and creative teaching

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Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 32: The Student Experience

July, 2009, 715 pages
Published by
Helen Wozniak and Sonia Bartoluzzi
ISBN
0 908557 78 7
Abstract 

My research explores pre-service teachers’ experience of quality pedagogy and its impact upon their developing understandings of teaching and learning. Grounded in co-inquiry and constructivist understandings of knowledge, this exploration unfolds as part of one of a number of case studies that examine the ways in which outstanding teacher educators engage with their students and engage students in their subject. The affective qualities experienced by participating students within such engagements, as well as throughout the research process itself, are specific sites of inquiry. Research across disciplinary fields highlights the importance of affect in the integration of experience, and this investigation both illuminates and problematises the interrelations posited between academics' experiences of their subject and teaching and students' experiences of learning by recent studies in higher education (HE). The data generated are presented in the form of 'creata' so as to offer a more visceral sense of the qualities experienced in their creation.

Keywords: affect, pedagogy, student experience