Love and Learning
Well, not "love" exactly, but emotion. Lately, I've been working on a draft of a scholarly article based on the work I've done at with migrant agricultural workers. Much of the article reviews survey responses from students who participated in a mobile clinic providing physical therapy (PT) services to these workers. One of the concepts that I've taken away from their responses is that so called experiential learning is, as I've always believed, a critical aspect of a good education. Experiential learning, to put it very simply, is about making a sandwich, rather than sitting in a classroom and hearing someone lecture about how to make a sandwich. (For more on this, see the March 16th post "Do, Don't Tell")
As I've looked over the responses more, though, I've wondered if there isn't something more. Not only did my students discuss the benefits of doing, they also talked a lot about how they felt during the experience. (For those who haven't read previous posts, our physical therapy students volunteer on a monthly basis at a mobile clinic that serves migrant agricultural workers. We travel out to farms and treat musculoskeletal complaints--think back pain--in this population. For many of our students this is their first experience working in occupational medicine, a "home health" setting and working with interpreters (most of our patients are Spanish-speaking.) Emotions ranged from frustration at communication barriers, to fear of incompetence, to pride in knowing their skills were benefiting real people. Does this influence of emotion affect what they learned from the experience, I wondered?
Thus I stumbled upon an interesting article, entitled "Predictable chaos: a review of the effects of emotions on attention, memory and decision making" by LeBlanc, McConnell and Monteiro. I love it when scholarly articles have snappy titles, mostly because of the rarity of phenomenon (Another favorite: Travel Broadens the Mind, Campos et al). In the article, the authors outline current research and theory about just my question, how does emotion affect learning? Well, it turns out that there are documented effects of feeling every which way. People who are angry tend to remember critical elements but forget extraneous details. People who are happy or in pleasant moods tend to consider a greater number of factors and details, and tend to be more creative in their solutions. Overall, emotion during an event tends to help with consolidation, that is, solidifying an event or a piece of knowledge into the memory. Interestingly, though, people's recall of prior knowledge decreases during highly emotional or stressful events.
A number of my students commented on the uniqueness of the experience (and, in fact, novelty is another element that tends to stimulate attention, and therefore, the potential for learning). My question now, as an educator, is how to structure the experience best for students (and their emotions) to make it as valuable to them as possible while also serving the community in need.
