Introduction

When approaching a curriculum for the first time, especially one designed by someone else, there are going to be things that don’t mesh with students, the rest of the curriculum, or an individual’s teaching style. Implementing the Fall 2018 English 101 curriculum at Western Washington University allowed me to deeply consider my own teaching style and philosophy. I knew that there were things I intended to change in the future but wanted to know how my students’ opinions aligned with my own, so when engagement seemed to weaken leading up to Thanksgiving, I chose to have an intentional, vulnerable, hopefully insightful conversation with my students. I was open with them about why I was changing up the lesson that day—that I had noticed the waning level of participation—and framed the conversation as a check-in, as wanting to know how they felt. The free-write, followed by small-group discussion, followed by full-class discussion yielded what I felt were positive results. We were able to have a fairly open conversation about how everyone felt toward and within the class at that specific time.

The felt productivity of the exercise led me to consider how making genuine consideration of feelings an integral part of class climate could impact overall engagement. But is emotion out of place in the academic and professional worlds? Some scholars say no. Amy E. Winans, for example, explains that “although emotions have long been categorized as anti-intellectual, as standing in opposition to reason or thought, emotion and thought are in fact connected” (Winans 150). If this is true, perhaps emotion can positively impact intellectual thought; perhaps emotion can lend itself to a productive class environment. The question I would like to explore is: how does encouraging emotional literacy through intentional reading, journaling, and discussion impact student engagement as measured by observation and student self-report?

What is emotional literacy?

Although there is debate among scholars regarding the difference between emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, with many suggesting that the term intelligence holds individualistic connotations, for the purpose of this proposal I will be using these terms interchangeably. The focus remains on emotional literacy but literature and theory regarding emotional intelligence also has a lot to offer to this discussion. Emotional literacy is the ability to be aware of emotions and respond to them appropriately or “the practice of thinking individually and collectively about how emotions shape our actions, and of using emotional understanding to enrich our thinking” (Matthews 44). According to Claude Steiner, emotional literacy has five components: knowing your emotions, managing your emotions, healing, empathy, and the ability to utilize and combine the components interactively (43). For Brian Matthews, emotional literacy is an important part of citizenship and can positively impact students’ abilities “to be self-aware, self-confident, show empathy for others and to be able to cooperate in dialogue with others” (20). Cooperation is key for a class such as this that features several partner projects as well as small-group and full-class discussions.

Steven Stein, author of The Student EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Academic and Personal Success, asserts that emotional intelligence is important for personal happiness and professional success (Stein 8). Because the classroom is a professional setting, or at the very least preparation for professional settings, emotional intelligence could be influential to students’ academic success. It would seem particularly helpful in an English 101 class in which the personal often infiltrates the professional.

How does emotional literacy fit within the English 101 curriculum?

This curriculum asks students to bring their interests, background, feelings, and memories to their work. The personal aspect of this class is most obviously present in the first major project: the literacy narrative. In the literacy narrative, students are asked to consider and write a brief narrative depicting a moment of literacy sponsorship in their lives. Memories of sponsorship can be intimate and students can potentially be ambivalent about how much of their self and emotion is appropriate to bring to the table, especially considering that this is the first major class project. Writing a literacy narrative at the start of the Fall 2018 quarter was an emotional experience for me and I even chose to scrap my more personal, emotional narrative in favor of what I viewed as a safer option. If a more experienced person can feel conflicted about what amount of self to present in a literacy narrative, it follows that students new to college would have ambivalence as well.

Questions of how much personal to include in the professional could best be navigated with a strong grasp of what is being asked and how it fits within the course. I want to avoid students feeling pushed to overshare but know that we also can’t separate our emotions fully from classwork because “what we learn is bound up with the embodied experience of how we learn” (Winans 151). A balance must be struck and this can be guided by structure and transparency. Stein connects transparency to emotional intelligence in his detailing of qualities of successful leaders (Stein 8). O’Connell and Dyment, as well as Montalbo and Ige, also emphasize the necessity of contextualizing, framing, and teaching how to participate in activities that ask students to be self-reflective or share potentially emotional material (O’Connell 52; Montalbo 101). In other words, we must be clear about what we are asking of students, how they can accomplish the task at hand, and what personal boundaries they can implement.

Part of the proposed curriculum change here is to include a reading that spells out what emotional literacy or intelligence is as well as its potential benefits. For this purpose, I will use the clearest found resource, the introduction to the aforementioned The Student EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Academic and Personal Success, specifically pages 1-9 and 16-18. This reading would introduce emotional literacy into the curriculum and provide an opportunity to connect this theory to other class changes: intentionally reflective journaling, small-group and full-class discussions, and a second literacy narrative late in the quarter. The emotional literacy reading will be take place alongside Deborah Brandt’s Sponsors of Literacy in order to promote emotion as another form of literacy, tying it concretely to the bones of the curriculum.

In their article “The Case of Reflective Journals: is the Jury Still Out?” Timothy S. O’Connell and Janet E. Dyment analyze 75 studies in order to synthesize the pros and cons of reflective journaling in a college classroom. Benefits of implementing reflective journaling as a class assignment include “centering students in the learning process,” adding an element of intentionality, “regular attention from the student,” an opportunity for students “to bring their emotions… into the learning process,” and “metacognition” as a learning practice (O’Connell 48-50). The capability for students to reflect on, integrate, and have a take-away of their own emotions is already a recognized possibility of reflective journals.

However, there are potential downsides as well, especially if there are doubts about purpose, structure, or boundaries (O’Connell 52). Analysis of the 75 studies found that students might “feel pressure to write ‘safe’ entries in their journals that may not include aspects of critical thought or deep reflection” or possibly “feel that journal writing is busy work” inappropriate for a college setting (52-53). I argue that these potential limitations can again be avoided by ensuring transparency, context, and positioning the journals as beneficial to other classwork. The initial framing of emotional literacy, discussion of the intro to The Student EQ Edge, and connecting emotional literacy both to the reflective journals and other class projects and goals will be essential. For that reason, I will be adding an additional literacy narrative toward the end of the quarter in conjunction with the already present author statement. This assignment will ask students to write a second literacy narrative, this time about a moment of literacy sponsorship, growth, or struggle from within the quarter. Students will be asked to use their reflective journal entries as inspiration for this project. It is my hope that this additional project will provide a purpose, connecting the lessons from the end of the quarter with the lessons from the beginning of the quarter.

Small-group and class discussions will also be implemented as an emotional literacy tool. Matthews and Steiner both recognize the connection between emotional literacy and interpersonal communication (Matthews 20; Steiner 8) and O’Connell and Dyment state that reflective journaling “promotes group discussion, communication skills, and cooperative learning” (O’Connell 50). I will utilize small group discussion to foster emotional literacy’s components of empathy, knowledge of one’s emotions, and management of one’s emotions. Small group discussions will follow guided journal entries and free-writes and intentionally bring the emotional literacy focus from the individual realm and into the classroom atmosphere.

The frequency of journal activities and discussions that include an emotional literacy component will be as follows:

• Twice-weekly short reflective free-writes that check in regarding feelings and class-work
• Weekly reflective guided journals re-capping the week’s work, tying it to class objectives, reflecting on feelings toward the work, and looking forward to future class work
• Weekly small-group check-in discussions following free-writes
• Twice-monthly full-class discussions following small-group check-ins
• Once-monthly collection of journals to check that work is being done and randomly surveying 10 journal entries from different students

Measurement

At the start of the quarter, students will be requested to complete a survey asking them to self-report level of comfort participating in class activities, comfort discussing and reflecting on personal emotions, general level of engagement in class, and beliefs about what it means to be engaged in a class. During each class discussion, I will estimate the number of students that participate and times I have to cold call or re-prompt discussion questions, then compare how this level of engagement changes across the quarter. Toward the end of the quarter, students will be asked to complete another survey mirroring the initial survey and with additional questions about how learning about emotional literacy and being asked to reflect on emotions throughout the quarter impacted their engagement in the class. Because my focus is on how emotional literacy will impact engagement and not whether emotional literacy will improve throughout the quarter, I do not feel that discourse analysis is the best tool of measurement. Hopefully the observed level of engagement in class discussion will increase over the quarter with less instructor prompting and student responses to the self-report survey will show an improvement of perceived engagement.