‘Sticky’ Learning: Assembling Bodies, Objects and Affects at the Museum and Beyond

This chapter contributes to current debates in school and museum education concerning the role and contribution of affect to learning. Taken to be the transmission of force or intensity across bodies, and to precede processes of cognition, affect serves to challenge currently established cognitivist, constructivist and representationalist forms of learning and knowledge in education. Guided by Deleuzian philosophy and drawing on case data collected over the course of a project investigating the potentialities of affective learning at the museum, it is argued that museum learning is ‘sticky’: it becomes attached through particular affects and has the capacity to leave a lasting impression. An outcome of encounters involving bodies, objects and affects, it brings forth new capacities for thinking, doing and being. The empirical material worked shows that bodies are a chief site of securing the circulation of affects, and that affective capacities of bodies are central to learning and can travel from one learning location (museum) to another (classroom). Importantly, these capacities can be highly political and ethical; they can activate learners’ ethical and political imaginations and induce attentiveness to otherness. Altogether, I propose that better understanding the phenomenon of learning and how it can be made to stick is a significant project in education. It affords consideration of the complex distributed agency (and pedagogic responsibility) that emerges from the breaking down of the subject-object and mind-body binaries and provides significant insights into and possibilities for a renewed practice of school and museum education.