education Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...

, affect is broadly defined as the attitudes,

emotion Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavior, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is ...

s, and values present in an educational environment. The two main types of affect are professional affect and student affect. Professional affect refers to the emotions and values presented by the

teacher A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. w ...

which are picked up by the

student A student is a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution, or more generally, a person who takes a special interest in a subject. In the United Kingdom and most The Commonwealth, commonwealth countries, a "student" attends ...

, while student affect refers to the attitudes, interests, and values acquired in the educational environment. While there is the possibility of overlap between student and professional affect, the terms are rarely used interchangeably by educational professionals, with student affect being reserved primarily for use to describe developmental activities present in a school which are not presented by the teacher. The importance of affect in education has become a topic of increasing interest in the fields of

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

and education. It is a commonly held opinion that curriculum and emotional literacy should be interwoven. Examples of such curriculum include using English language to increase emotional vocabulary (see affect labeling), and writing about the self and history to discuss emotion in major events such as

genocide Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people. Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, defined genocide as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" by ...

. This type of curriculum is also known as therapeutic education. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, therapeutic education focuses on the emotional over the intellectual.

Educator attitudes

In order for such curriculum to be implemented, it is essential that educators be aware of the importance emotional literacy. Examination of educator and student attitudes towards emotional literacy is a common topic of research. Researchers have found that staff have conceptions of what constitutes emotional literacy, including being self-aware of one's own feelings, using emotional language, and being cognizant that children have feelings that need to be taken into account. In addition, staff discussed the necessity of having all educators dedicated to creating an emotionally literate school, and the detrimental effects of even one educator not supporting this initiative.

School attitudes

Roffey Horsham () is a market town on the upper reaches of the River Arun on the fringe of the Weald in West Sussex, England. The town is south south-west of London, north-west of Brighton and north-east of the county town of Chichester. Nearby ...

(2008) examined the influence of emotional literacy on the school as a whole using ecological analysis. It was found that positive change was gradual, and involved multiple elements. For instance, teachers who felt as though they were genuinely valued and were consulted about policy felt happier at work. In turn, these teachers felt better prepared to handle conflicts that arose inside the classroom, and when students experienced this positive approach they were more cooperative (see

cooperative learning Cooperative learning is an educational approach which aims to organize classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. There is much more to cooperative learning than merely arranging students into groups, and it has been desc ...

). This shows how incorporating emotional literacy into a child's education is a school-wide collaborative effort.

Educator experience

In a study of the experience of students in a teacher education program, Colmenares and Jarvie found that the "stuckness" students encountered in the process of becoming a teacher, particularly when trying to enact social justice practices, could be understood as affective. The authors critique the paradigmatic structure of ''learning'' as a concept that struggles to account for the affective aspects of both becoming a teacher and attempting to enact social justice through pedagogy.

Funding

Examples of government funding of emotional literacy include Every Child Matters.

Criticisms

Criticisms of emotional literacy in curriculum revolves around the idea that it although well intended, it is designed to disempower students.

References