From affective pedagogies to affected pedagogues: a conversation

In this chapter, Petra Bakos, Redi Koobak, and Kharnita Mohamed engage with affective pedagogies, centring on the experience of affected pedagogues in classrooms delicately placed along Global North/South/East/West axes. Petra and Redi held several writing workshops for residency participants of the project (Stint) that led to this volume, first separately – Redi as the resident academic writing instructor of the project, Petra as a facilitator of creative-somatic writing approaches invited by the Central European University – and finally with joint energies and modalities during the last project meeting at the University of Western Cape. Kharnita facilitates the conversation as participant of the Western Cape workshop, and as a scholar and novelist well versed in various approaches to writing and teaching. Together they revisit the workshops which approached writing as an embodied form of thinking that taps into abstract cognition and the visceral layers of emotions and memories. However, despite being well equipped with theoretical and practical tools to encourage self-reflexivity and self-positioning in writing, Redi and Petra had to take on pressing challenges of reflecting on their own positionality as workshop facilitators. This conversation swirls around the challenges and those “hot” teaching moments, which turned out to represent also “hot” learning moments for them as pedagogues.