Hello, happy New Year, and welcome to this week’s issue of Teaching. Today, Dan Berrett talks about the use of emotion in teaching and learning, we look at some research on the utility of science labs, and we ask how you handle students’ anxiety.
The Value of Emotion
People who go into academe tend to gravitate toward the life of the mind, not the heart. So it’s no mystery that most teaching strategies tend to stick to the safe and rational terrain of the intellect. But what pedagogical advantages do instructors lose when they avoid emotions in the classroom? For me, learning has always had, at its core, an affective component — coming to a better understanding of something just feels emotionally satisfying. And so I’ve been interested to see some recent writing on the subject.
“We connect, understand, and remember things much more deeply when our emotions are involved,” Flower Darby, a senior instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center, wrote recently for Faculty Focus. And in a 2016 book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that targeting students’ emotions is an effective way to motivate and educate them. One method, wrote Ms. Cavanagh, an associate professor of psychology at Assumption College, is to be mindful when interacting with students. “Being emotionally authentic with yourself and with your students,” she wrote, “can also go a long way toward a more mindful, present classroom.”
I recently heard about a striking example of this practice at Boricua College, in New York City, where the pedagogical purpose of emotions takes center stage. Every semester, students must take a course in affective development, says Shivaji Sengupta, Boricua’s vice president for academic affairs. He contacted me after our recent newsletter about fostering interdisciplinary conversations about teaching — Boricua faculty talk among themselves about affect during weekly two-hour meetings. During the course’s first two years, students reflect in writing about their emotional response to the subject matter. At the course’s upper levels, they explore the differences between their values and the professional norms of the careers they’re pursuing. In the process, says Mr. Sengupta, they develop a capacity to listen, respond, and discuss their values.
The usefulness of emotions in teaching was palpably demonstrated to Mr. Sengupta many years ago, in the late 1980s, when he was leading a discussion at Boricua about King Lear. The class was talking about the final scene of Act IV between Lear and his daughter Cordelia, whom he initially disowns but with whom he later reconciles. Lear tells her that she would have good cause to give him poison — and that if she did he would take it. In response, Cordelia says simply, “No cause, no cause.”
“Whenever I used to come to that part, I was completely overwhelmed by my emotions,” he told me. On that day, he was struck deeply by the expression of forgiveness distilled into two words and he started crying. “The students were all silent and I was a little embarrassed,” he said, recalling that he tried to move on.
But a student stopped him. “The professor just cried here over something we were reading,” he remembers the student saying. “What happened to you when you started to cry?” Mr. Sengupta explained how the moment reminded him of his relationship with his father, and how Shakespeare’s language helped Mr. Sengupta think about ideas like forgiveness and authority. The student, he recalled, listened intently. “This is emotional knowledge that I think I can live by for the rest of my life,” the student said. It is one of Mr. Sengupta’s most memorable moments as a teacher.
Boricua has used a similar approach in its lessons. If students write about how a particular reading or discussion has affected them, professors will often ask them to talk about their experience at length in class. “The text,” he says, “floats away from the frozen book to the student’s lives.”
