The
understanding of the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has
undergone a major transformation in recent years.
We all have good and
bad days; moments of excitement, engagement, and inspiration and moments of
disappointment, disengagement, and frustration; some topics that we find
interesting and some that we do not. These differences influence how children
learn and how teachers teach. In short, learning is dynamic, social and context
dependent because emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why
people think, remember, and learn.
The understanding of
the influence of emotions on thinking and learning has undergone a major
transformation in recent years. Emotions interfere with learning. It is
literally impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make
meaningful decisions without emotion. The brain is highly metabolically
expensive tissue, and evolution would not support wasting energy and oxygen
thinking about things that do not matter to us. We only think about things we
care. This insight has important implications for education. It opens questions
about how, when, and why students learn meaningfully, how technology, culture,
and social relationships shape learning and how teachers can understand and
leverage emotions more productively in the classroom.
To have a hope of
motivating students, of producing deep understanding, or of transferring into
real-world skills, we need to find ways to leverage the emotional aspects of
learning in education.
To leverage emotions,
it helps to understand what emotions are. Emotions are action programs that
have evolved as extensions of survival mechanisms. They have evolved to keep us
alive. Human beings have basic emotions, such as fear and disgust; we have
social emotions such as love. Thanks to our emotions, we can also develop curiosity
to make us explore and discover, admiration to make us emulate the virtue of
others, and compassion, indignation, interest.
The feeling of these
emotions organizes our sociality and morality. It forms the basis for
creativity and invention and for the decisions we make for now and for the
future, even in academic contexts. For example, the act of dedicating one’s
professional life to teaching is possible only because of our ability to feel
these emotions.
Emotions are essential
to managing life. An efficient life management means managing not just our
physical survival but our social life and intellectual life. Just as poets and
artists have suspected for millennia, we feel social relationships and intellectual
achievements using the same brain systems that sense and regulate our guts and
viscera, adjust our blood chemistry and hormones.
Emotions, such as
interest, inspiration, indignation, and compassion, are active mental
constructions. They pertain to what we think we know about the world at the
current time, interpreted in light of our experiences and our imagined possible
futures, using our available skills. They rely on subjective, cognitive
interpretations of situations and their accompanying embodied reactions.
Meaningful learning is
actually about helping students to connect their skills to abstract,
intrinsically emotional, subjective and meaningful experiences. It appears to
be essential for the development of truly useful, transferable, intrinsically
motivated learning.
In addition, emotions develop
with maturity and experience. In this sense, emotions are organized patterns of
thoughts and behaviours that we actively construct across our life spans to
adaptively accommodate to various kinds of circumstances, including academic
demands. The emotions of a pre-schooler are not the same as those of a fifth
grader, a teenager, or a young or an older adult. The emotions of a new teacher
are not the same as those of a veteran teacher.
Understanding emotions
is about the ways in which students and teachers are experiencing or feeling
their emotional reactions.
Emotions must be
considered Skills.
Thanks
to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.
