Emotions: Our Gateway into Learning
By: Heather Kretschmer
Reflecting back on my early days of teaching, I was focused on what my students needed to do to achieve certain goals in the target language. What schemata would they need to activate? What vocabulary would they need? Grammar? Speech acts? And so forth.
Certainly, skills development is a key part of course content in language classes. But it became obvious fairly quickly that my students wouldn’t necessarily encounter the situations I envisioned. Take for example a unit on “Welcoming Visitors” designed for a group of employees working at the same company. Maybe this is a small subsidiary that rarely gets visitors, so some of these employees have not yet had the opportunity to welcome visitors in English. Is it still useful for this group to practice welcoming visitors in English? After all, company employees taking part in a professional development language course are very busy individuals who don’t have a lot of time to devote to learning the language. They may see the relevance of knowing how to welcome visitors in English in an abstract way, but without an immediate need, it may be hard for them to muster the energy to learn and practice useful language.
What I’ve found works well in a teaching context like this one is to have students imagine a particular situation and immerse themselves in it, including the emotions they might experience if they were in that situation. So, before asking the company employees to learn useful language or practice together, I might say something along these lines: “Picture yourself welcoming visitors from your parent company in country X. Where are you in the company? What do you and your visitors say to each other? How do you feel?” This “Picture-Yourself-in-Situation X” technique invites students to put themselves in the shoes of their potential future selves. It involves both cognitive and affective components, and it’s a useful way to introduce topics outside the students’ experience.
The Interplay of the Brain, Emotions, and New Experiences
Without doubt, our emotions are an essential part of us. But where do emotions come from? In our Main video, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that, contrary to popular belief, emotions don’t happen to us. Instead, our brain creates our emotions, and it does so by drawing on our past experiences to predict what will happen to us.
So, if we’re unhappy with our current emotional landscape, what can we do? Feldman Barrett explains that, while it’s not possible to alter our past experiences, we can alter our present ones when we make the effort to experience different things. For example, we might learn something new, watch new films, read books, or act in a play. New experiences help the brain move beyond its normal predictions. With practice, these new experiences become automatic, enabling us to predict differently and behave differently from the ways we currently do. As Barrett puts it, “You are an architect of your experience.”
To take this a step further, I believe that teachers are architects of students’ experiences in the classroom, at least to a certain extent. Depending on the teaching context, we may not have control over the content of our lessons, the assessments, and certainly not our students’ behavior during class. But we are in full control of the emotions we outwardly project in the classroom, the attitude we have towards the class activities we guide students through, and the ways in which we respond to students’ efforts and their behavior.
Emotions: Essential to Learning
In the teaching contexts where we are responsible for course design, class activities, and assessments, we can design educational experiences that tap into students’ emotions. In our More video, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang emphasizes that emotions are fundamental to learning. When we’re learning something, we’re not just thinking about the subject matter, we’re also experiencing emotions. Immordino-Yang maintains that “meaningful learning always has an emotional component.”
When we are emotionally engaged with a topic, brain regions that are active include the brain stem, anterior insula, and anterior middle cingulate. The brain stem, located deep in the brain, is essential for survival. The anterior insula and anterior middle cingulate are both found in the cerebral cortex. The anterior insula senses what’s going on in our body while the anterior middle cingulate is involved in alerting us to how hungry and thirsty we are. Immordino-Yang comments that we draw on the same brain systems that keep us alive and sense our bodily needs when we are learning academic content and are emotionally engaged with that content. She states: “When people are subjectively engaged with what they are thinking about, they are actually more alive, […] more awake, more conscious as they engage with that information.”
But it’s not enough to give students tasks to do and ensure they’re paying attention in class. Immordino-Yang highlights the important role that different brain networks play in learning. When we’re focused on accomplishing a particular task, blood flows to interconnected brain regions neuroscientists call the executive control network. So, for example, when your students read a text, trying to understand the content, they engage their executive control network.
But when your students finish reading the text, they may be thinking about the bigger picture and how the content is relevant to them. At this point, blood flows to different regions of their brain called the default mode network. This network is activated anytime we stop focusing on a particular task and allow our thoughts to travel along their own meandering paths. The default mode network is active whenever we daydream, wonder about something, imagine ourselves in different situations, and so forth.
Your students will go back and forth between the executive control network and the default mode network, and as they do so, the salience network, involving their emotions, helps students determine what’s important in what they read and why it’s relevant for them.
Immordino-Yang emphasizes that course design often targets students’ executive control network. We tend to plan tasks and activities where students have to do something and show their work. While that’s important, if we only ask students to complete tasks, we’re not giving them time and space to reflect on why what they’re learning is important and how it relates to their lives. According to Immordino-Yang, allowing students to utilize all three networks helps students develop their brains in ways that allow them to think deeply and emotionally about complex topics.
Learning a language is hard work and not always exciting. Highlighting why we’re asking students to do a difficult task helps them see its relevance for them. For example, if some of your students enjoy playing online games, you can frame an activity as “learning x will help you chat with other players online when you’re playing your favorite game. Picture yourself communicating quickly and easily with these players. Wouldn’t that make the game even more fun?” Once you’ve hooked students emotionally, they may be more likely to engage with the content, even if it’s hard.
Imagine the Following . . .
Picture yourself working with students in the classroom. They are trying out new language together and are using the target language as much as possible in the task you set. They are curious and having fun to boot. What are they talking about? How are you interacting with them? How do you feel? How do they feel? I invite you to savor this scene for a few more minutes and then read the articles in this issue to discover how to make the scene you just pictured in your classroom a reality.
Heather Kretschmer has been teaching English for over 20 years, primarily in Germany. She earned degrees in German (BA & MA) and TESL (MA) from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Currently she teaches English at the University of Göttingen in Germany.