A long stick up the nose

About laughter, learning and literacy-as-event

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the notion of literacy-as-event, which reflects a search for theoretical and analytical approaches that make it possible to understand literacy and learning in ways that involve affect, corporeality, and unpredictability by directing attention to the fleeting meaning making processes that arise in relationships between people, things and texts (Burnett & Merchant, 2020). I do this by revisiting a literacy activity from sixth grade, where three 12-13-year-old children are involved in reading and reconstructing a text about mummies (Laursen, 2016, 2019; Laursen & Kolstrup, 2018). If you follow – in a literacy-as-event perspective – the affective intensity and corporeality in this literacy activity, including the laughter of the three children and their play with language and the universe of the text, you see how the children create a vivid carnivalesque universe (Bakhtin, 1984) full of laughter and learning potential. Through their cooperation and their intense immersion in the textual universe, they create a deep understanding of the text, which at the same time gets imbued with personal meaning, which concerns the fragility of the individual body and the interconnectedness of human bodies. Against this background, I argue for looking at all literacy activity also as affective encounters and empirically directing attention to how the learning space happens and how reading texts is created in often unpredictable ways.