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!
Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in higher education it feels a bit unconventional in my context, but on the other hand, many of the tools offered in there are similar to what I do anyway, but now they are all collected in one place and can (allegedly, I
haven’t tried yet) be easily integrated with for example Canvas (our learning management system) or Kahoot (an online voting/quiz tool), which we use regularly.
Fear can lead to fight, flight, or freeze responses — or so we often hear. So far, I was under the impression that fear was generally not a good emotion to create in students since from what I had read, it hinders learning. But my colleague Léa recently sent me the meta-analysis by Tannenbaum et al. (2015), and it turns out that fear appeals can and do actually positively influence behavior under almost all conditions, and they hardly backfire! Who would have thought?
When I was recently thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability, I came across the term “emotionally-responsive teaching” that really spoke to me, even though I did not really know what it was. Trying to read more about it it turns out that maybe it isn’t as clear a concept as I had hoped, or maybe not capturing exactly what I was hoping for, either. But here are some thoughts, and a connection to teaching about sustainability.
In communicating about climate change specifically, and other sustainability challenges, there is often the debate around how to kickstart people into action. Paint the doom-and-gloom (i.e. realistic) picture so people will act out of fear (and I just recently wrote about how anger can be a constructive emotion leading to action), or draw more positive pictures so they feel hopeful and that they can make a difference, and therefore don’t get paralyzed?