Unplugging the Affective Domain: Can “Slow Spaces” Really Improve the Value of Cultural Literacy?

Abstract

In the popular presentation of calls to “unplug,” whether in the classroom or simply day-to-day life, young people may find their images summoned as an indicator of a changing nature of literacy, communication and understanding of the world around us. However, calls to re-introduce the young to “slow” spaces may leave the real challenges to cultural literacy unharmed, or even re-enforced. This paper will briefly examine two images of the young summoned in the counter-intuitively “fast” discussion of the “slow” unplugging movement and tie these to the recurring historical narrative of a more authentic “slow” space freed from human activity though various cultural analyses by Slavoj Žižek. This will suggest that “slow” spaces may emerge as Carnivalesque eruptions rather than true spaces of cultural change. Engagement with cultural literacy will then be examined in relation to the Affective Domain of learning that  produces the normalisation of values and world-views rather than mere replication of tasks, to suggest that, while institutions’ images may benefit from the presence of “slow spaces,” educators may find their actual engagement with slow learning and the Affective Domain to be an unsupported and unintegrated secondary addition to the primary “real-world” services expected by the institution and students.