First planted on Dec 2024 🌱

The Felt Force of Literacy: A Reflection from the Classroom

While reading about [[ learning sciences ]] on Bluesky, I came across Ty Hollett’s The Felt Force of Literacy (2020), a commentary in Reading Research Quarterly. The piece appears in a special issue on affect theory—a theoretical framework that centers not just emotion but the intensities, atmospheres, and embodied forces that shape our experience. Drawing from Spinoza, Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, affect theory invites us to reconsider what moves us, literally and figuratively, in learning and in life.

Hollett’s commentary uses affect theory to challenge the dominance of purely cognitive models in learning sciences. Rather than seeing learning as just information processing, he argues that learning is always saturated with feeling. Emotion, mood, environment, and history don’t just “color” learning—they constitute it. Literacy, then, is not merely about decoding text or composing coherent sentences; it is about navigating spaces—digital, physical, emotional—where certain bodies and voices are made to feel visible, invisible, anxious, affirmed.

One of Hollett’s most striking moves is his use of atmosphere and mobile architecture to describe literacy as something that moves, something shaped by the “felt force” of a moment. He lists the affective conditions surrounding 2020:

“masks-ventilators-fear-abundance of caution-distance-anxiety-Zoom school-Ahmaud-George-Breonna-fire-rage-murder-police.”

This struck me hard.

As a first-generation immigrant currently teaching adult learners to read and write in English—many for whom English is both a first and second language—I paused to consider what my own list would sound like. Hollett’s litany, so rooted in a particular cultural moment, made space for me to think about the emotional infrastructure of my classroom.

I’ve composed my own list—an atmosphere of our classroom in fragments—but it’s staying close to the chest for now. Some things ask to be felt before they’re spoken.

This is what the “felt force” of literacy feels like for us. A charged atmosphere, not always dramatic, but deeply affective. Students often access our lessons through their phones—devices that are cracked, prepaid, low on data. They are learning English while navigating migration, trauma, parenting, and survival. Literacy is not abstract for them. It is bound up in living.

And it is mobile: students read PDFs in transit ro shared screen, listen to voice notes while cooking, practice vocabulary in the subway after long shifts. The classroom is not four walls—it’s wherever a bit of learning can wedge itself into a day already too full.

This is why Hollett’s framing is so important. It invites us to see not just what students learn, but how it feels to learn in particular conditions. It also reveals the power structures embedded in literacy: who gets to feel confident, fluent, at ease—and who is made to feel behind, foreign, uncertain. The affective terrain of the classroom is not neutral; it reflects social inequities that show up in language, in posture, in silence.

For my students, literacy is often a practice of quiet resistance: insisting on growth in a world that often writes them off. Affect theory doesn’t just help me analyze that dynamic—it helps me feel its urgency. Hollett’s work reminds me that if we are to truly support learners, we must attend to the affective atmospheres we create and inhabit together.

So, how do we describe the felt force of right now? Perhaps not with grand theories first, but with lists. With fragments. With shared breath in strained spaces. With the small, brave gestures of continuing to read, to write, to learn—together.

References

• Hollett, T. (2020). The felt force of literacy: Affect, classroom life, and research. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(3), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.308
• Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
• Spinoza, B. (1996). Ethics (E. Curley, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1677)