Learning Through Emotion: Moving the Affective in From the Margins

Abstract

In an educational environment where experiences offered to children are increasingly being shaped by testing regimes and rigid curriculum design, learning experiences can often border on the bland and the neutral, or at best, focus on positive emotions such as joy and happiness. The work which is described in this article was designed to stimulate a far broader spectrum of emotions, from relief to resentment, fondness to frustration. In the discussion that follows, the authors consider a case where drama pedagogy was used to create a set of learning experiences designed specifically to simultaneously tap into both the cognitive and the affective domains. Using a narrative structure that nevertheless provided opportunities for the children to have agency within the fictional context, the work suggests that there is a strong need for detailed research that explores the relationship between emotion and learning using drama pedagogies.