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Abstract
This post-qualitative dissertation examines the claim that affects flow through art educational settings and asks the questions: What might be learned through an attunement to atmospheres of ordinary affects in public school arts education and, how might such an attunement offer glimpses of the ways ordinary affects could offer difference in arts educational experiences? The author argues that through an attunement to ordinary affects in arts education, the prevailing structures of education, such as standards, mandates, and data, might be loosened for affective potentials to be actualized. Theorizing with Stewart’s (2007) Ordinary Affects, arts classroom and school spaces were visited to glimpse at the potential for affective encounters. Artifacts were collected and created during and after visits, which included fieldnotes, sketchnotes, photographs, sounds, and written vignettes that were analyzed through an arts-based analysis of these things inspired by the openness that a theory of ordinary affects offers. Findings suggest that attuning to things in schools that are not normally the focus of education, like sound, opens space to think about connections and potentialities. This inspires thinking about how attending to the affective atmospheres of learning opens possibilities for transformation and expectations of learning spaces to evolve. Teachers are encouraged to embrace the unexpectedness of the ordinary as this might be a space for the extra-ordinary to happen and to notice that when heavy habits of education like routines and schedules are disrupted, opportunities for affective atmospheres breathe difference into classrooms, education, and beyond.