Living in Care and Without Love — The Impact of Affective Inequalities on Learning Literacy

Abstract

In the general field of education, the role of the emotions has only begun to be explored in depth in the recent past. The work has focused on a range of issues such as: care and the school curriculum (Cohen, 2006; McClave, 2005); teachers’ emotional labour (Hargreaves, 2000, 2001); the role of the affective domain in educational ideology (Lynch et al., 2007); a school ethic of care (Noddings, 1992, 2006, 2007) and mothers’ care labour in children’s education (O’Brien, 2005, 2007; Reay, 2000). This chapter takes a new turn, towards the role of care in the learning of literacy. It describes the process and findings of a three-year ethnographic study carried out with survivors of institutional abuse in Irish industrial schools. In particular, the perspective moves from the teacher or parent as caregiver to the learner as a care recipient in a learning relationship.