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Invitation to Learning: Emotions, Inclusivity, and Community
- 1. Invitation to Learning Emotions, Inclusivity, and Community
- 2. THANK YOU
- 3. THANKYOU– team: HeatherL.Urry JeffreyL.Birk CarlE.Fulwiler Tufts University Columbia University Medical Center University of Massachusetts Medical School
- 4. The Day • Sarah Rose Cavanagh on emotions and learning • Activity: Mindfulness, Carl Fulwiler • Alexander Browman (for Mesmin Destin) on addressing socioeconomic impacts on learning • Activity: Lessons from Acting, Paul Kassel • Marti Cleveland-Innes on developing communities of inquiry
- 5. TALK ONE
- 6. Engagement Does Not = Entertainment
- 7. Disengagement is LESS WORK for students
- 8. “Love in pedagogical work is an orientation. It’s a commitment to the personhood of learners, to their intersectionality, to their deep emotional backgrounds, to the authenticity of their lives. It is a decision to commit first to the community of learners and second to the material we’ve come to teach.” - Sean Michael Morris
- 9. Why Emotion?
- 10. This is the bill of goods we’ve been sold…
- 11. BUT…. “Most, if not all, human decisions, behaviors, thoughts, and creations, no matter how far removed from survival in the homeostatic sense, bear the shadow of their emotive start." – Antonio Damasio
- 12. AND… “Any separation of emotional and cognitive processes in the brain doesn’t hold up in reality. The brain areas …active when people perform tasks that engage emotional and cognitive processes turn out to be in constant and continuous interaction.” - Kiverstein
- 13. So maybe…
- 14. But not really. Something more like… Reason Desire Emotion
- 15. Whether you want to think about emotions in the classroom or not, they are there.
- 16. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand? This is so confusing! This is so interesting! If I fail this class, I’ll lose my scholarship. If I don’t succeed, it shows women ARE bad at math. I need to make my parents proud. I got it! I finally got it! Emotions during class
- 17. Like a slap in the face. When I receive a bad grade my mood immediately changes. Nothing else in the world matters in that moment. I feel as if all of my hard work is pointless and unrecognized. I am usually mad and will not listen in the class. It makes you feel inferior because you feel like you're the only one who got a bad grade. If I get a bad grade it just triggers a million thoughts of "I am going to fail at life" which I know is irrational but can't help feeling anyway. It makes me feel like I am not capable of learning the information. Emotions upon being graded (actual responses from my students)
- 18. Moreover, emotions enhance learning. Because…
- 20. And… Learning Depends on Cognitive Resources SELECTIVE ATTENTION FOCUSED ATTENTION WORKING MEMORY
- 21. Cognitive Load Theory Germane (process of learning) Tapping into Relevant Emotions Focuses Attention and Working Memory on Germane Processes – Creating More Resources for Learning Germane (process of learning) Intrinsic (task-related processing) Extraneous (distractions) Germane (process of learning) Intrinsic (task-related processing) Extraneous (distractions)
- 22. EMOTIONALLY ENGAGING TEACHING ART BY JOYCE HESSELBERTH FOR THE CHRONICLE Storytelling Emotional Hooks Community Performance
- 23. “When we educators fail to appreciate the importance of students’ emotions, we fail to appreciate a critical force in students’ learning. One could argue, in fact, that we fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all.” - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
- 24. Keep in touch! sarah.rose.cavanagh@gmail.com Twitter: @SaRoseCav Instagram: #SarahRoseHIVE
- 25. TALK TWO: Addressing Socioeconomic Gaps in Academic Motivation and Achievement: The Role of Students’ Experiences in School and Society Alexander Browman (@alexbrowman)
- 27. U.S. Bachelor’s Degree Attainment by Age 25 Pell Institute (2015) Income quartile:
- 28. Educational Attainment and Socioeconomic Mobility Pew Charitable Trusts (2012) 53% 90% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Do not receive post-secondary education Have post-secondary education If born into the poorest income quintile, likelihood of moving up at least one quintile if you…
- 29. Consequences of Inequality • Food insecurity • Safe neighborhoods • School funding and resources • Students’ and parents’ work schedules Inequality Achievement gaps Disparities in resources
- 30. My Theoretical Framework Inequality Achievement gaps Disparities in resources Psychological consequences
- 31. Overview: Psychological Impact of Context on Low-SES Students School context Family context Neighborhood context Societal context Classroom context
- 32. (1) How Societal-Level Inequality Shapes Beliefs about Opportunity and Academic Outcomes among Low-SES Students Browman, Destin, Kearney, & Levine, 2019, Nature Human Behaviour Browman, Destin, Carswell, & Svoboda, 2017, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
- 33. (2) Promoting Multiple School- Based Pathways to Socioeconomic Mobility Browman, Svoboda, & Destin, under review
- 34. (3) The Effects of a Warm or Chilly Climate Toward Socioeconomic Diversity on Academic Motivation and Self- Concept Browman & Destin, 2016, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- 35. (4) Promoting a Lasting Sense of Institutional Support for Socioeconomic Diversity Browman, Destin, Cockrell & Rivera, in progress
- 36. Summary: Psychological Impact of Context on Low-SES Students School context (Studies 3-4) Societal context (Studies 1-2)
- 37. Implications • Psychological mediators of inequity on academic outcomes • Targets for intervention
- 38. Thank you! Email: browman@bc.edu Website: alexbrowman.com Twitter: @alexbrowman Papers discussed: bit.ly/browmanpapers
- 39. ACTIVITY: Learning Outcomes: at the end of the workshop, you will be able to: • Identify and enact your action preference— Charisma • Connect action to a task--Confidence • Apply the workshop concepts to a teaching challenge--Conviction
- 40. The Power of Presence: Lessons from Acting Paul Kassel
- 41. TALK THREE: Social and emotional presence in face-to-face, blended, and online environments Martha Cleveland-Innes
- 42. Community of Inquiry Social Presence The ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally as ‘real’ people (i.e., their full personality), through the medium of communication being used. Cognitive Presence The extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse in a critical community of inquiry. Teaching Presence The design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes. Garrison, D.R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
- 43. Emotional Presence I acknowledge emotion expressed by the students in my course. In my role as instructor, I demonstrate emotion in my presentations and/or when facilitating discussions, online or face-to-face. Students feel comfortable expressing emotion through the online medium or in the face-to-face classroom. Emotion is expressed, online or face-to-face, among the students in my course. Expressing emotion in relation to sharing ideas is acceptable in my course. I find myself responding emotionally about ideas or learning activities in my course.
- 44. Strong Instructional Designers on Deck “The present policy context for change in pedagogy and practice is extremely harsh. We are faced by a globalized neoliberal political economy allied to the spread of authoritarianism, which is creating an increasingly anti-democratic political climate. This in turn threatens academic values and marginalizes dissenting voices in the academy.” Johnston, B., MacNeill, S., & Smyth, K. (2018). Conclusion: Advancing the Digital and Open Education Agenda. In Conceptualizing the Digital University (pp. 235-244). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. http://www.mumblesrowingclub.cymru/testimonials through fair use and attribution.
- 45. Thank you for a wonderful day!
Editor's Notes
- When I talk to people about the ideas in my book, the most common resistance I encounter regards the idea that engaging our students is our first and sometimes most vital step. Some educators read engagement and think entertainment. They believe that when we talk about teaching as a performance profession or making class material self-relevant, that we are suggesting that we should craft our colleges to be four-year trips to an amusement park.
- But what engagement DOES mean to me is summed up nicely in this quote by digital pedagogy guru Sean Michael Morris. It means committing first to our students and second to our material. It means forming real, authentic relationships with our students. And it means approaching your teaching and your scholarship through the gift of care, the gift of love.
- Because this is the bill of goods we’ve been sold from lay conceptualizations of how the mind works – that reason and emotion are separate and at odds with each other, and that if we want to teach students to be scholars and good citizens, we should rein in emotion.
- But increasingly, research from psychology and neuroscience suggests that in fact, reason is quite emotional, that emotions often DRIVE reason, that human beings are far from logical creatures unswayed by affect and desire. As one example of how tightly woven emotion and reason are, Antonio Damosio formulated his seminal somatic-marker hypothesis of decision making after studying people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal region of their brains. This a regional critically involved in emotional processing. Damasio found that these patients had intact intellect in terms of language, mathematics, logical reasoning – but that they were forever impaired on both subtle social emotional interactions and in decision making. They could not decide where to go out to eat or which shirt to wear or which tv show to binge on – because they would dither endlessly between the options, unable to weigh them using a gut response.
- This is no surprise to neuroscientists, who increasingly have found that emotion and cognition are not separate in the brain, but rather “in constant and continuous interaction” – that in the brain, circuits relevant to emotion are deeply engaged with those involved in attention and memory and behavioral action.
- Because this is the bill of goods we’ve been sold from lay conceptualizations of how the mind works – that reason and emotion are separate and at odds with each other, and that if we want to teach students to be scholars and good citizens, we should rein in emotion.
- Where emotion and desire certainly influence and inform reason, but where reason can also temper emotion and desire.
- Let’s consider for a moment a student in class. So many of their experiences already involve emotion – from interest (or boredom) in the material and class activities, to motivations relevant to desire and to fear, to the anxiety involved in what we know as stereotype threat (explain), to social influences on emotion, to extraneous of unrelated emotion.
- So we know from a century of basic science that these cognitive resources are limited.
- Ok, so cognitive resources are limited, and biased, and it is really hard to get information into LTM, even presuming that all of your students are well-rested, attentive, and thoroughly motivated to engage in learning. But turns out we have a secret weapon of sorts with which we can hack these biased systems. And those are the emotions.
- When your activity or assignment engages learning-relevant emotions, by evoking curiosity or interest, or by presenting the material in a humorous way, or by calling out how the material relates to one’s individual life and concerns, this reduces distraction and thus frees up some resources that can now be dedicated to the task and/or process of learning.
- Thanks so much for having me! Mesmin and I have collaborated a lot over the last 8 or so years so I’m really happy to have the opportunity to be here in his stead.
- The issue at the heart of all this work is the fact that at all levels of education, there are persistent academic achievement gaps that exist between students from high and low socioeconomic status or SES backgrounds, and a big issue is that these gaps have only been getting wider in recent years.
- …but it’s been rising sharply since the 1980s, with virtually all gains being made by wealthier individuals, such that the gap is now closer to 70%.
- And these socioeconomic discrepancies are critical because educational attainment represents the primary means to future mobility and success in industrialized societies, especially for those from the lowest SES backgrounds. Specifically, if you are born into the bottom income quintile in the US and you don’t complete some kind of post-secondary education, there’s almost a 50% chance that you will remain in the quintile as an adult, and so the chance of you experiencing a lot of mobility is very small. By contrast, if you are born into the bottom quintile BUT you complete a post-secondary degree, there’s almost a 90% chance that you will experience upward mobility and escape the bottom quintile as an adult. And we see similar trends in studies that have focused on Canadians and samples from many other developed countries. Now obviously these trends are correlational or longitudinal at best, but taken together with all of the available data connecting these factors, the data strongly supports the idea that one of the barriers to mobility for youth and young adults from low-SES backgrounds is the ability to pursue post-secondary education.
- So given these implications, researchers have long been interested in understanding what causes these achievement gaps to emerge between high and low-SES students. And one of the main things that this kind of research has historically focused on is how this general economic inequality between lower- and higher-SES students and their families produces disparities in important resources that are known to contribute to academic success. Just as a few examples, these disparities include things like…
- Now, while these disparities in resources have obvious immediate consequences for the socioeconomic outcomes gaps, as a psychologist, what I’m interested is the possibility that beyond these material disparities, inequality can also have psychological ramifications that can jointly or even independently contribute to the achievement gaps. And this idea of independent psychological contributions is important because while it is without question that addressing these structural and financial resource gaps is necessary for addressing achievement gaps…
- So harnessing this context-focused framework, my work argues that students live their academic lives in several important contexts, and how students internalize their experiences with inequality in each of these contexts has unique implications for their academic outcomes. These contexts include their family lives, characteristics of their classroom environments, the broader environments at the schools that they attend, the specific neighborhoods that they live, work, and go to school in, and even the broader society that they inhabit.
- So in the first studies I’ll be discussing, I’ll be focusing one important psychological path that I’ve identified by which societal-level inequality can influence the academic outcomes of low-SES students, which is by affecting their beliefs about the availability of opportunity in their society.
- So we designed an intervention to test whether low-SES students who are at risk of not attending university but are made aware that there are multiple viable school-based paths to mobility—as opposed to just one path, through university—might maintain high academic motivation and interest.
- So building from this framework, we have explored the psychological impact of low-SES university students’ perceptions of whether their academic context is chilly or warm with regard to their support for students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. So to test this, we first conducted 3 experimental studies…
- And because this work is ongoing, this is the one part of the talk that I would really appreciate not being tweeted. So as with the initial work on designing mobility belief-based interventions, the key is be to provide students with real in-school resources that make it clear that their school is indeed actively supportive of socioeconomic diversity. And collaborating with educators and administrators at NU, we’ve begun testing the impact of creating such resources through…
- …and low-SES students who have reached post-secondary education felt more connected to and less distressed about school when their institution felt supportive versus ignoring of socioeconomic diversity.
- And critically, each of these lines of research has helped to identify potential targets for intervention and policy. Specifically, these findings suggest that in order to promote achievement and reduce early dropouts, education systems might benefit from working to provide all secondary students with viable school-based pathways by which mobility can be attained, and providing all post-secondary students with concrete resources that make them feel truly supported in academia.
- And of course, thank you so much to all of you for listening. If you happen to be interested in any of the published work I discussed today, you should be able to scan these QR codes to get copies. And I’m happy to take questions!