Lost (and found) in trans-lation: The Handmaid’s Tale as a Respond-able Literary Lab (LitLab) in the ESL classroom with a feminist new materialist pedagogy

Abstract

This article reports in an exploratory case study that investigates how to design a feminist new materialist pedagogy in a higher education class. This exploratory case is the pilot respond-able Literary Lab (LitLab) of the Junta de Andalucía I+D excellence project P20_00337 “Laboratorios de enseñanza responsable con perspectiva de género: La interacción entre culturas literarias y visuales como agente de intervención social”; The students are learning English as a Second Language (ESL) in a public university. It focuses on how affective pedagogical strategies improved competences of the students, such as critical thinking; as well as they improve the objectives in second language acquisition. In particular, it provides empirical evidence to contribute to a change in the design of the curriculum by including a close reading of an original version of a contemporary English novel The Handmaid’s Tale. As a result, the participants learned English unconsciously and acquired a collective capacity instead of pursuing a neoliberal competence. They acquired better oral communication in English, complexified their written expression and a growing self-confidence necessary for students in their L2 classes. With the illustrative data that I present here, I aim at contributing to a larger research field in the feminist new materialist pedagogies that promotes a horizontal learning process based upon affects and intra-actions, instead of hierarchies and pre-designed curricula.