I’ve been struggling with the formation of this project, going back and forth, questioning the practicality and concreteness of my various ideas. Always my first inclination is to return to my (Catholic) social justice background and nothing we’ve addressed in this class fits more comfortably into that space than Freire. I asked myself how I would want to decentralize power, how I would want to encourage ownership, how I would want to build community. I mulled over everything from debate to (to quote a former teacher of mine) “if you’re not eating, you’re not learning!” But what I’ve been reflecting on in regards to my current class as of late has been their lack of emotional investment.

When we had a reflective free write followed by an honest class discussion, three things became clear: that my students are tired and it’s therefore become difficult for them to care, that it’s been difficult to keep themselves grounded in the class due to the lack of reflection between individual projects, and that they would like to have more sincere discussions centered not around testing their knowledge on a new concept but on their feelings or opinions on what we’ve learned. I’ve since begun thinking of another type of “literacy:” emotional literacy. How would an encouragement of assessing our feelings, well-being, comfort levels, etc., and subsequently communicating those things impact our ability to grasp other literacy types that we are asking them to learn throughout the quarter? This question feels more accessible to me than the amorphous ideas about power and justice and community.

I am curious as to how I could go about even trying to encourage something like vulnerability and honesty in a classroom. Personally, I’m super comfortable with this stuff but I think I’m in the minority and I don’t think I was comfortable as an 18 year old either. Why should they care? What could help them buy in? To be clear, I’m not talking about spilling about our hardships. I’m not talking about group therapy. Obviously, that is inappropriate. I’m talking more about check-ins at the beginning of the day, reflections consistently, and an honesty and vulnerability built into those things.

Because I’ve switched gears so many times and my settling onto emotional literacy is so recent, I don’t really have sources identified that I know I will useful. But there are a few I have picked out in order to investigate further they are:

“Discovering Emotion in Classroom Motivation Research” by Debra K. Meyer & Julianne C. Turner,  as found in Educational Psychologist.

“Emotion in Teaching and Learning: Development and Validation of the Classroom Emotions Scale” by Scott Titsworth, Margaret M. Quinlan, and Joseph P. Mazer, as found in Communication Education.

“Classroom emotional climate, student engagement, and academic achievement” by Maria R. Reyes,  Marc A. Brackett, Susan E. Rivers, Mark White, and Peter Salovey, from Journal of Educational Psychology.

The problem of how to encourage this emotional literacy within the classroom is a tough one. The problem of how to measure it may be even tougher. I haven’t gotten super far in the formulation of methods at this point but my current thoughts are to begin the quarter with a rather broad survey. It would potentially have questions about comfort levels, past educational experiences, expectations, etc. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm students with on-the-nose questions. My next consideration is to introduce a reading near the start of the quarter that introduces the idea of honest, vulnerable communication. I would hope that this experience could be an intentional one. Being involved in open, vulnerable communication is something you have to agree to, not something that is enforced on you. Across the quarter, we would start with check-ins daily, perhaps in circle form, perhaps in free-write and then small group sharing. This would be built in to be habitual. We would also pause between each project to reflect on what we did, how we did, and how it fits within the course of the class. We would then take stock of how we feel about moving forward before jumping into the next project. The quarter would end with another survey as we did in the start. Data would also be supplemented by observation. Establishing a control group could be a challenge. Would another instructor’s class be the control? Would they be willing to take the same surveys? Would the instructor make the same observations? More effort needs to go into establishing methods. I’m hopeful that our next R.A.B. and the above sources will assist me in this process.