Emotionality, spatiality and relationality: deciphering the emotional geographies of Chinese language education in Australia

Abstract

ABSTRACT While emotional geography is a burgeoning field in educational research, research on foreign languages education, and Chinese language education specifically, has largely ignored emotionality and space. We begin to rectify this situation through nuancing how students’ Chinese language learning experiences are (re)shaped by recurrent emotional and relational experiences in distinctive ways. More specifically, we focus on how emotional geographies manifest in encounters with difference, where underprivileged students’ emotions are both evoked and become attuned to the learning within a multicultural Australian primary school. Thus, this paper serves as a counter-discourse to more technical and linguistic driven conceptions of teaching that dominate language education and research. Our central argument is that the spatiality of the classroom, physical closeness, and sociocultural distance created possibilities for experiencing different aspects of emotionality. The emotional geographies inducted students into learning may break through fear of China/the Chinese in Australia where Sinophobia and Sinophilia co-exist. This article, therefore, contributes to the conceptual development of emotional geographies of education by expanding it to Chinese language education and paying close attention to global citizenship and multiculturalism, which have (to date) been largely implicit in the field.