Affective potentials in informal technology‐enhanced learning settings

“…a whole other story is vibrating within” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p. 17). Articles in this special section illuminate how affective experiences within and across informal learning settings stick, linger, evolve and, at times, produce social change that defies conventional definition and that exceeds language's capacity to fully describe embodied experience. Given the current widespread community, cultural and financial investment in informal learning settings (Ito et al., 2013), and their proliferation across the globe (Leander & de Haan, 2017), the papers in this special section demonstrate how emerging cultural theory (eg, Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) can aid our understandings of how such programs cohere and sustain their change-making practices, as well as re-define, through affect theory, what change could be. They force researchers to consider the potentials of shifting focus from technologies, and social practices with technologies, whose value has been institutionally predetermined. Instead, they open educational technologists to the potentials made possible by valuing how places of informal learning come to feel valuable, and how they come to move bodies toward more intensely felt experiences of teaching and learning. As section authors illustrate in their analyses of affective potentials in technology-enhanced informal learning settings, there is a whole other story vibrating within. Section authors make timely theoretical and practical contributions that pivot away from “major” issues of the technologies embedded within these settings, or the design principles that inform them, in favor of the “minor” energies that course through them and thereby enable them to persist (or not, see Phillips & Killian Lund, 2019) across space and over time. That is, they focus less on mobile devices, or making or virtual reality—although these “major” areas are embedded within—in favor of how people, things and feelings resonate (Phillips & Killian Lund, 2019), how they reassemble (Bell, Taylor, Riesland, & Hays, 2019) and how they foment dissensus (Rowsell & Shillitoe, 2019) in order to produce and sustain change. In the end, the articles in this special issue are attuned to how hegemony is both secured and disrupted and can “mobilize a lithe and powerful response able to resist, rework, and undo those social relations and practices” (Katz, 2017, p. 599). In their article, “Co-Constructing Care in a School-Based Digital Design Studio,” Phillips and Killian Lund describe the life—and death—of a school-based digital design studio called the Digital Atelier (DA). Inspired by the sadness teachers, mentors and students felt upon the closing of the DA, they reflect on the “care-full” practices of the studio's mentors that made the DA feel like “a place where something took hold.” The authors elaborate on these care-full practices through their focus on “sustaining affective resonance” to describe how “ongoing intentional affective response reverberated in the space and through mentors' and young people's intra-action with one another, with the space, with its resources and tools, and with their own self-knowing to sustain a culture of care.” The musical metaphors they deploy attend to the crucial moves mentors must make to respond to the “breaks, decays, and pauses” that proliferate as moments accrue within informal, technology-enhanced learning settings. Drawing on theories of affect and on Rancière's notion of dissensus, Rowsell and Shillitoe contribute an understanding of how making and maker pedagogies can become a form of activism with young children. They develop their conception of craftivism “as a movement and form of activism” that “challenges conventional, instrumental views of learning experiences in classroom spaces.” Their analysis describes the felt, embodied and political conditions through which children challenge dominant discourses and make themselves known differently through both creative and technical production during making experiences. Vasudevan and Riina-Ferrie bring an intimate temporal perspective to learning in an after-school film program called the Educational Video Center (EVC). Whereas Phillips and Killian Lund attune themselves to care-full resonations within the DA, Vasudevan and Riina-Ferrie trace how a program itself—and the digital products created therein—resonates with one participant nearly fifteen years after his participation in it. In doing so, they (re)visited with alumni of the program and (re)watched the films that those alumni produced at the EVC. Through a temporally sensitive multimodal analysis of one participant's experience, they describe the affectively-charged moments within the film that have persisted beyond it over time. In the end, they call for—and offer—new ways to address the question: “How do moments add up to lives?” (Lemke, 2000, p. 273). Bell, Headrick Taylor, Riesland and Hays's “Learning to See the Familiar: Technological Assemblages in a Higher Ed (Non)Classroom Setting” describes a community-forward undergraduate course that forefronts how “students use their mobile devices, bodies, and interactions-in-place to understand familiar locations as socially and historically contingent sites of learning (and teaching).” Through an analysis of moments of “disequilibrium” for students, or the embodied ways students confronted “conflicted interpretations” of the community spaces they inhabit, the authors detail how (1) disorienting experiences, (2) re-assembling the everyday and (3) stabilizing new relationships offered learners the opportunity to come to know—through their moving bodies—how “places themselves have something to teach us, and by being in these places we include ourselves in the historical narrative that is continuing to unfold.” Vea analyzes the new media production practices and experiences of animal rights activists. He develops the notion of “im-mediacy” in order to grapple with how the immediate intensities of affective experience challenge our assumptions about how technologies “mediate” experiences in predictable or predetermined ways. Indeed, Vea shows how animal rights activists produce media messages not to communicate a well-defined idea alone, but to affect others through unpredictable embodied intensities, and to move them toward action. His analysis, therefore, bridges affect theory and more conventional theories of technological mediation, showing how “activists as learners and educators attempt to channel affect into particular systems of meaning that are pertinent to organizing an alternative future.” Finally, Ehret et al. describe a speculative approach to design-based research (DBR) in education. They analyze the first phase of a multi-year project to develop a video games and learning program for socially marginalized teens in a community-based afterschool center in Montréal. They progress the concepts of immediation and rhythm to describe speculative design as a form of DBR, and of educational design, that emerges in time and that helps to improve the quality of moments as they happen over time. They argue that similarly felt immediations can emerge across timescales, and that both rhythms, as concept and immediations, as a practice of attuning to rhythms of change potential in affectively laden moments in informal learning programs, can lead to more fully embodied approaches to DBR and to educational design. Together, these papers describe programs, learners, teachers, mentors and places from the middle. In fact, they are all still in process. They are still lingering, as Vasudevan and Riina-Ferrie, show; their impacts are still resonating, as Phillips and Killian-Lund show; their (im)mediations are still reverberating, as Vea shows. It is our hope that, as a collective, these papers reverberate with readers, too, in ways that move the field of educational technology to attune itself to the “vital, incessant, and unruly” (Merriman, 2019, p. 3) feelings and energies that vibrate within informal, technology-enhanced settings: the whole other story.

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