Emotional Energy as a Barometer for Culturally Adaptive Teaching and Learning of Science

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Emotional Energy as a Barometer for Culturally
Adaptive Teaching and Learning of Science

• Kenneth Tobin
• The Graduate Center of CUNY
• ktobin_at_gc.cuny.edu

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Current Barometers

• Control over
• Accountability for achievement
• Its a bit of a stretch
• Agency Structure relationship
• Communities of practice

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Theoretical Perspectives

• Science as culture
• schema practices
• patterns of coherence contradictions
• Sociology of emotions
• Macro phenomena are constituted in meso and micro
  levels of social life
• Bricolage

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Methodology

• Critical ethnography
• Centrality of the authenticity criteria
• Teacher and student researchers
• Multiple data sources
• Field notes
• Videotape
• Interviews cogenerative dialogues

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Collage of teaching and learning
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Emotions

• Nervous
• Happy
• Jittery
• Shaken
• Anxious
• Shock
• Fear
• Terror

• Anger
• Righteous
• Ordinariness
• Comfortable
• Sad
• Sorry
• Solidarity/togetherness
• Depressed

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Emotional Climate

• Emotions flow across situations
• Build successful interactions and chains of
  interactions
• Minimize unsuccessful interactions and associated
  negative emotions
• Create rituals or customary interaction chains
  (of success)
• Mutual focus
• Synchrony (space time bodily and emotionally)
• Identity issues (positionality co-presence
  issues)

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Teaching

• Mix of language codes
• Lively (verve)
• Oral fluency/flow
• Playfulness
• Gestures
• Multiple resources
• Focus on learning, learners and doing science

• Allows students to do what they gotta do
• Emphasis on success in a difficult subject
• Unconscious
• Contradictions between what is said and what is
  done

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Learning

• Focus and refocus
• Playful
• Movement
• Verve
• Rap

• Salience of respect
• Earning
• Giving
• Self monitoring
• Conceptual and technological tools for self
  analysis
• Quicktime
• PRAAT

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Ways forward

• Minimize negative emotions and focus on
  establishing successful interaction chains
• Build positive emotional energy in science
  classes
• Maintain the appropriate rhythms
• Special role for small group and one on one
  interactions
• Regularize conversations about culture, code
  switching and trajectories of change

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http//web.gc.cuny.edu/urbaneducation/tobin/