Emotions and Learning

Abstract

Recently while sorting through some old files in my office (remember paper files?) I came across a yellowing, smudged newsletter from an elementary school parent-teacher organization with a feature story about emotions and their relationship to education. “Emotions can disrupt learning,” the article warned. “Clear thinking is difficult to accomplish in the midst of strong feelings.” The notion of emotions and learning as antagonists to each other was my second clue, after the yellowing paper, that the newsletter was rather dated. Granted, the article’s main point involved encouraging parents to pay attention to the impact of family stress on children’s ability to focus in school, surely a timeless concern. But educational theory and practice have made a huge turn from the newsletter article’s basic premise—that emotions inhibit learning—to recognizing the profoundly significant, intertwined roles that emotions and cognition hold in how we learn. In fact, the two are so deeply connected that now theorists use the term “emotional thought” to reference the matrix of processes such as memory, decision making, motivation, learning, and creativity that are integrated with emotion to contribute to knowing (Immordino-Yang and Damasico 2007). Instead of separating thinking/cognition from feeling/emotion, contemporary neuroscience points to their integration all the way down to the cellular level in our brains, or, as former public-school teacher and affective and social neuroscientist Mary Hunt Immordino-Yang puts it, “It is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotions. ... [Emotions] are essential to managing life... not just our physical survival but our social life and intellectual life” (2016, 18, 19). Educators know from observing transformations in people that emotions, like cognitions, change across time and with experience. It is in this sense that Immordino-Yang asserts that emotions are skills. As people grow and learn through experience, they not only learn how to make sense of various situations in which they find themselves, but also learn how to make sense of their emotional reactions. “Emotions are not add-ons, distinct from cognitive skills. Instead, emotions such as interest, anxiety, frustration, excitement, or a sense of awe in beholding beauty, become a dimension of the skill itself” (Immordino-Yang 2016, 21). Many of us in religious education possessed an intuitive and experientially validated sense of the significance of emotions for learning long before we had access to contemporary developments in neuroscience to help us understand why this is the case. The integration of emotion and cognition in social and cultural contexts is work for which faith communities are ripe, for example, because these often are communities where significant relational interactions happen around “big questions and worthy dreams” (Parks and ProQuest (Firm) 2011) that are also invested with passion and emotion. But schools and other teaching-learning contexts also can be sites for such integration. Immordino-Yang’s assertion that “we only think deeply about things we care about,” means that teachers “need to find ways to leverage the emotional aspects of learning in education” (2016, 18). This is not a call to engage in emotional manipulation in the name of education! Rather, it is an invitation for religious educators to pay attention to what invites learners to care about the ideas and practices we teach—to find the emotional connections between the lives of learners and the teaching we offer, to facilitate deeper reflection and learning. For a much more in-depth