Historically, social studies teaching (and teacher education) discourses have focused on the cognitive registers, both in how teachers teach—their inquiries, objectives, and aims—and in how social studies teaching lives are imagined to be lived (and felt). This study departs from these discourses to focus on the affective registers, aiming to explore how the affective attachments of teachers are brought to bear in their work. Indeed, we feel before we think, and I am interested in how these embodied feelings, what I call affects, play a role in the everyday practice of social studies teaching. This dissertation opens with an introduction to my conceptualization of affect, situating it within broader conversations about how affect works within discursive practices like teaching and also how issues of affect, emotion, and feeling have been taken up in prior scholarship in the field of social studies education. The next chapter discusses my methods and methodology, and I detail the theoretical framework and qualitative research methods guiding this study. This chapter concludes with an introduction of the study’s four participants: practicing secondary social studies teachers at a large urban high school. Following this, four data chapters share my findings. Chapter 3 looks specifically at an affective research at my research site, and I draw connections between this moment of affectivity, the affective attachments of the participants, and their approaches to teaching about protest and democracy in Civics. Chapter 4 explores affects of shame in both social studies curricular texts and in the participants themselves, and I show how shame can be a positive and motivating affective force, especially in how issues of Whiteness and racism might be critically interrogated. Chapter 5 looks at the textual, aesthetic attachments of the participants, and I call for approaches to social studies curriculum and teaching that are more prepared to facilitate meaningful aesthetic experiences in social studies classrooms. The final data chapter (Chapter 6) looks at how affects are embodied by the participants during a teacher discussion (a Focus Group), and I show how gendered and raced affective structures position particular affective identities in different ways. This dissertation concludes with a chapter that discusses my findings and offers implications for the fields of social studies teaching and teacher education.
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