Abstract
The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.