Yesterday I was one of those annoying people on their laptop during a seminar, taking notes during Maria Weurlander’s presentation on “When learning becomes difficult: Emotional challenges in education”, and then our discussions on the topic. But it was just too interesting and relevant not to!
Maria Weurlander (of Stockholm University, Center for the Advancement of Teaching) gave an overview over the research she and colleagues have done on emotions in healthcare and teacher training. Emotions obviously have an important influence on learning. They affect what we pay attention to, how we process information, form memories, and make decisions. Positive emotions help thinking outside the box and holistically, negative emotions direct more focus on details and lead to risk avoidance. Really strong emotions of any kind need to be dealt with before we can focus on something and think clearly. Emotions can be both activating (think curiosity or frustration) and deactivating (boredom, satisfaction, resignation, etc).
There are obviously a lot of emotions tied to learning, relating to stressful assessment situations, to feeling belonging with the group or the subject, but also relating to the subject itself. There is a bunch of literature on for example maths anxiety (also statistics and programming), and of emotions related to sensitive topics (violence, vulnerability, climate justice, … For example, a while back I wrote a review-type blogpost on emotions relating to climate change and sustainability).
Maria investigates emotions specifically in health care and teacher training, both of which come with challenges that maybe go beyond what most students experience, especially when students do work placements, think for example having to take pathology courses and being part of autopsies, or meeting and dealing with a bunch of teenagers. In those situations, students have to manage their own emotions and physical reactions, academic vs emotional engagement, professional challenges that are ethical dilemmas, existential reflexion about human vulnerability in the world. Of course that takes focus away from the pure teaching content!
Also, being in their future workplaces confronts students with a reality that might be very different from their idealistic ideas of how their future colleagues are going to be caring, socially competent professionals. Coming back from placements in school, students describe teachers as having a resignation culture (questioning “why do you even want to become a teacher?” after having given up themselves), displaying unethical behaviour (e.g. badmouthing students), or even showing racism or other non-democratic behaviours. Plus, students experience how teachers’ legitimacy is questioned by parents and the wider society, and they feel that they are overqualified in terms of subject area knowledge compared to what they will be teaching. They think about how to draw boundaries between their private and professional lives, for example working in a school that is far away from where they live, in order to get the physical distance to be able to deal with emotions. Similarly, medical students experience a hardness culture (where having a thick skin is valued), and where they are at the bottom of a steep hierarchy and have to accept the status quo until they are experts themselves. They also feel a huge burden of future responsibility, question themselves, and are afraid of committing malpractice. They also think about how to ensure boundaries towards the personal lives of patients.
Right now, students often postpone dealing with those problems until they are professionals (when they also won’t get support to deal with the emotions, but at least that’s a future-me’s problem). They partly talk with family, friends and peers, but are also (maybe over-)careful to not overburden especially family with experiences that they have not had.
So how do we make room to deal with these emotions in our teaching?
This is where the presentation led over into a discussion. Suggested questions were
- should we protect students from certain experiences/situations?
- how to support coping with it?
- how to teach with the risk of triggering strong emotions?
- how do we prepare ourselves as teachers?
In my group, we first talked about how there are several different sources of emotions that we need to deal with. There are the emotions that are triggered in the classroom (on purpose or by accident) vs emotions brought back into the classroom (either from a work placement or just from students’ private lives). Maybe they need to be dealt with in different ways?
For emotions that we know will be triggered through for example work placements, but also through sensitive content, we need to consider how we can prepare students even before they experience the emotions. What coping strategies can we teach, or emergency contacts give out?
Also, maybe there are “forbidden emotions” towards patients or students, or the subject itself, that might be difficult to even articulate.
In climate anxiety conversations, there is a framework to deal with emotions that goes a bit like this:
- Create space to share (difficult emotions). When I did my teaching training, there was always this mantra of “Störungen haben Vorrang” — Disturbances need to get priority treatment. Whatever it is that is distracting students, we need to give it priority over whatever we had planned to get it out of the way, otherwise they will not be able to pay attention to our topics anyway.
- Validate the emotions! Listen, and confirm that we understand and might have felt, or still feel, the same.
- Embody the emotions: colouring, dancing, … or going for a run!
- Act. What can I do to address the source of the emotion? One thing that I am very interested in at the moment is channelling anger into activism (see for example my posts on the Climate Activism 101 course)
But this is a framework for how to react when emotions are coming to the surface, it would of course be even better to make space to talk about emotions even before they become disturbances. And that can and should happen in our teaching, for example having discussions about how at some point you will have to prioritise between competing values and ideals (My favourite method: “Even over“). One suggestion for a method to include reflexion in teaching from climate change communication is reflective journals. And of course we can also encourage peer support groups, and help students develop strategies to deal with difficult emotions.
We then went into the fears that teachers have about dealing with students’ emotions in class, and how we can help them prepare for that (beyond sharing the framework above). For example, it might be good to observe a confident teacher dealing with a difficult situation. In person, or maybe in a (staged) video? We can also create simulations/fishbowls with peers to try out different situations (that participants might bring, or following a script). And we can model the behaviour we want to encourage, for example by showing vulnerability and share experiences of failures.
On the topic of “should we expose students to topics that we know trigger negative emotions?”, we feel that we should not exclude relevant topics, but should consider issuing trigger warnings and maybe explicitly give permission to leave, explain how we are going to deal with situation, like that we will not call on people to speak, that it is ok to say “pass”, etc.
One point that came up in the very end is that it is a huge responsibility and burden on individual teachers to deal with all of this in their classes when they have not been trained to do it, which I acknowledge it is. But here I am torn between “then read up on how to do it!!” (which is what I did for example on microaggressions and sustainability teaching, so if I could do it, why can’t other people?) and at the same time acknowledging that we do not get time or training, that I did it on my own time and that was maybe not the healthiest thing to do, and that there are things that are simply outside of our scope of practice. And there needs to be, as Steven said, a collective responsibility plus, at the same time, grace for the individual teacher. Which I find very difficult to balance, and to give myself (and others) that grace. How do we then get the “collective responsibility” to be taken up and acted upon so that it is not individual teachers trying to cope on their own, and how long should we wait until we, again, take things into our own hands? If it is not us starting to act, who are we waiting for to take the lead and carry the weight, and will they come?
But it was a great seminar, lots of food for thought, and a great start of a conversation with colleagues on a super important topic!