​

Title: Learning in Times of Disruption: Affect, Memory, and Student Identities

Name of presenter: Bronwyn T. Williams

Affiliation and academic title: University of Louisville, Professor of English and Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition

Email address: bronwyn.williams@louisville.edu

 

Abstract:
We live in a world of disruptions large and small, from climate breakdown, the pandemic, generative AI, economic precarity, funding cuts, political extremism, and more. The impact of these disruptions for students, however, is in more than just perceived learning loss. Instead, such experiences often disrupt students’ normalized practices of learning and highlight their evolving relationships to place, technology, school, and their affective needs. These changing experiences of where and how students learn can challenge their long-standing conventions and assumptions about their identities as students and writers.

 

In this talk I use research on students’ experiences during the pandemic to offer an example of how, as they remade places of learning, worked through digital media, or rethought interactions with instructors, more than their practices changed. The students articulated the ways in which their perceptions and relationships with place, technology, and school were evolving. I’ll discuss how these students experiences and narratives offer insights into how we might respond to the impact on student identities of other disruptions, such as developments of generative AI or economic and political instability. In framing these effects as shifting and evolving relationships, I bring together theories of affect, memory, narrative, and socio-materiality to explore how such disruptions can shape motivation, agency, and conceptions of the nature of education.