Glimmers of Care: Attending to the Affective Everyday in Ninth‐Grade Literacy Classrooms

In this qualitative study, the authors examined how care was enacted, understood, and valued by teachers and students in nine ninth‐grade English language arts classrooms. Following two yearlong cohorts of teachers, the authors explored sociopolitical interpretations of care, specifically focusing on how care was an everyday, political phenomenon in the classrooms. Drawing on observations, teacher and student surveys and interviews, and students’ multimodal compositions and artifacts, the authors analyzed glimmers of affect within and across classrooms. The authors framed their findings around two vignettes to illustrate how clusters of analytic glimmers revealed three dimensions of political, everyday care in the classrooms. First, care was shaped by the structures of space and pedagogy in classrooms, such as the requirements imposed on student composition. Second, the manipulation of the actual space of classrooms—the positioning of desks and bodies—shaped care. Finally, the materiality and modality of student production in classrooms highlighted both the platforms on which students demonstrated forms of care and the authoring decisions they made. The authors conclude with specific suggestions for using glimmers as a methodological approach in other affective studies and for designing classrooms that provide avenues for students to shape the enactments of care in classrooms.