Critical Emotional Engagement: Attending to Emotions in Teaching Controversial Public Issues

• In Event: New Approaches to Humanizing and Relational Engagement With Public Issues in Social and Civic Education

Abstract

April, a government teacher in upstate New York, described teaching controversial public issues as “always a balancing act, particularly with issues that students really disagree about. It really feels very much like riding waves, keeping an eye on everyone’s faces to see where they are in that moment.”

This paper explores what has been learned from teachers who chose to “ride the waves” by engaging in emotionally complex work with the aim of deepening students’ engagement with the ideas and experiences of others. Drawing on analyses of teachers’ perceptions of the role of emotions in their teaching (Author, 2019; Author, 2022), this paper provides a practical approach for supporting social studies teachers’ engagement in critical emotional teaching, focusing specifically on teaching controversial public issues.

This paper is framed by feminist and sociocultural theories that conceptualize emotions as relational, dynamic, and socially constructed (Ahmed, 2004). Not just products of individual minds or social contexts, emotions are part of the process through which the physiological and the social are produced and blurred (Zembylas, 2007). Emotions play a significant role in how social hierarchies, identities, and relations of power are upheld and challenged (Bonilla-Silva, 2019), and as such play a significant role in what and how teaching and learning takes place in social studies classrooms (Matias, 2016; van Kessell et al., 2020).

For this paper I draw on existing research with 17 secondary social studies teachers working in urban, suburban and rural contexts, who were asked to reflect on the role of emotions in their teaching (Author, 2019; Author, 2022). Findings demonstrated that teachers considered emotions as they made decisions about two key components of their work: building classroom communities and engaging students in learning content. Fear of creating discomfort (for themselves or others) led some teachers to avoid teaching controversial topics. Teachers defended choices to limit student learning as necessary to ensure students’ “safety”. Yet teachers also encouraged students’ emotional engagement with challenging issues as a gateway for learning. Some teachers engaged students in emotionally complex topics well, many struggled with uneven success, and still others caused real harm without fully understanding what was happening and why.

Synthesizing what was learned from teachers in this research who demonstrated a capacity to thoughtfully consider their own and students’ emotions in their teaching, this paper presents an approach for helping teachers in a range of educational contexts become more purposeful in considering the work they want emotions to be doing in their classrooms.

Attending to students’ critical emotional engagement requires teachers to be purposeful and reflective in their pedagogical decision making. Very briefly, this includes considering four key components as they plan and teach: (a) purposes for emotional engagement, (b) emotional relevance of the topic, (c) making emotions visible, and (d) learning from emotions.

This approach aims to bolster teacher pedagogical agency by making explicit, and thereby defending, the purposes and practices for teaching emotional and controversial issues.

Author

• Maia G. Sheppard, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author