Can you Feel It? Should we Help Students Express How They Feel? The Digital Side of Feelings
Eftychis Kantarakis, Greece
Eftychis Kantarakis is a teacher trainer working for National Geographic Learning Greece. He is interested in using technologies in ELT and getting along with others. He has written for TESOL Greece Newsletter, the IATEFL Voices and other publications. He has been a project manager and editor for a number of publications of supplementary materials for OUP, National Geographic Learning and other ELT publishers. Current professional interests are revolving around empathy in ELT. He enjoys working with teachers around the world and presenting with his wife, Vicky Chionopoulou. E-mail: Eftychis.kantarakis@cengage.com
Menu
Introduction
Background
But what if that amount of data is already there?
Should emotions be taught in the classroom?
Conclusions
References
More often than not, we find that our students have problems expressing themselves in the classroom, or even outside it for that matter! As an old teacher of mine used to say, students have a fire in them, but the moment it comes out of their mouth, it goes out. They try to express their feelings in more ways than the restricted hip-hop vocabulary can allow them to, but they rarely go beyond, “fine”, “awful”, “cool” or in more recent times, “tragic”. They may even find themselves finishing most sentences with a full-stop kind of “sad”, the way a certain dominant political figure prefers to comment on most unfavourable comments about him.
Being language teachers ourselves, it falls on us to help students not only express their feelings, but also to come in touch with what they are actually feeling. It is claimed, though not necessarily proven, that one of the key reasons of depression, is the inability of a person to understand what it is they are feeling. When one does not understand their own inside world, it almost impossible for them to make head or tails of what it is they must do, what decisions to make or what the world expects of them. Lost in uncharted emotional territories, they cannot find the way to see through the haze of feelings. And when there seems to be no way out, there is no reason to believe that staying in has any point. You find yourself trapped in a pointless maze.
Strong words from someone who has never sat in a psychology class, I know. But having spent most of my life in classrooms be that as a student, a teacher or a trainer, I have come to realise that it is not an easy thing to understand how most students feel or help them know how they feel, let alone how to express their emotions in English.
And then, there are machines! Computers and “robots” have always been deemed as incapable of understanding human emotions. This has always been one of the arguments used to support that computers can never replace teachers, among other professionals. A computer can never be adaptive enough or sufficiently reactive to the emotions of a human counterpart. The reason is simple. Humans express their emotions through a number of different media. Their facial expressions, their body posture, a tremble of their voice, to name but a few, can, in combination, signal different emotions or levels of them. It can be extremely difficult for many human beings to interpret those emotions effectively. Not equally for everyone of course. That’s why we humans also have ways to measure emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence (EI), also known as Emotional quotient (EQ), is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal(s). An EQ test can tell you how well you can understand others or yourself then. But it is based on human interactions and thousands of psychological evaluations of human beings. And there are so many ways to express a human emotion that the amount of data needed for a computer to be able to “compute” a reaction would be astronomical.
In the last decade or so, people have been willingly and prolifically providing data of their expressed feelings and emotions to the world wide web through social media. Think of the millions of selfies or group pictures that people upload every minute. Think of all the social media posts, uploaded photos and videos, phone recordings, heat-sensitive security cameras and wearables that monitor physiological signs, the big question is not how to collect enough data, but what we're going to do with it, as Konstantinos Karpouzis says in his TEDx Talk “A selfie with a robot”! Each and every one of those selfies, if processed correctly, can serve as examples of expressions of hundreds of shades of different emotions. You can find the gist of his talk in the TED Ed lesson, “Can machines read your emotions?” here: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/can-machines-read-your-emotions-kostas-karpouzis
To me that is worrying, not because computers will know how we feel and thus find the right time for a robot revolt, bringing about a terminator style “Judgement Day’’, but because the more we hand over to computers, the less we feel we have to be engaged to them ourselves. You let a computer do the math for you and you forget your basic arithmetic. You let a computer keep a list of the things you have to remember, and you don’t have to remember them any longer. You make all information available to you at all times through Google, and you don’t have to learn anything anymore. Maybe you rely on a computer to tell you how to react when someone feels something for you and you don’t have to feel anything anymore! Surely, the applications of such technology are opening a new world for the 21st or the 22nd century and they can be extremely useful, but I would like it more, if they were specifically aimed at helping people understand their own emotions.
In her now known to all RSA talk The Power of Vulnerability, based on her same-titled book, Dr Brené Brown presents to the nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman's four attributes of empathy that can lead a person to form real connections.
- Perspective taking
o To be able to see the world as others see it and recognise their truth.
- Staying out of judgement
o judgement discounts the experience and is mainly an attempt to protect ourselves from the pain of the situation.
- Recognising emotions in other people
o being in touch with our personal feelings in order to understand someone else's and putting aside "us" to focus on our loved one.
- Communicating this recognition
o Trying to use phrases like “I’ve been there, and it feels awful” or “It sounds like you are in a hard place now. Tell me more about it.”
This may well represent a suggested mentality to live our everyday life by. I know that whenever I try to share some problems with a friend, it does not help me when they try to list the cases when this has happened to them as well. It feels like they are trying to show me how they have had it worse than me. It suddenly becomes a contest, where my emotional status and my problems, “lose”. How does it help me when my problems are shared only to be graded on a scale relevant to your own past problems?
But could it also be a teacher’s perspective to classroom dynamics? After all, to misquote John C. Maxwell students don't care what you know until they know that you care! What if we try to walk more often into our student’s shoes? How about showing them that we understand their struggle to learn the long lists of irregular verbs of the multiple types of conditionals. Helping them find the reasons why they have problems doing this, rather than telling them they should just study them harder. Showing empathy in action may be key. It’s all right to say “I’ve been there myself”, but perhaps we ought to refrain from giving a lengthy account of what has happened to us, unless there is a lesson behind your story, probably an example of how our partner can overcome the difficulty. If you think that giving students an account of how much worse your case was will help, think again! It is just not helpful. Also, don’t start your “sympathetic” approach with “At least”, as in the examples below.
“I can’t stay focused on such long texts in this course book!”
“Al least you have interesting course books. When I was your age we had very boring courses.”
This is just silver-lining a difficult situation, which detaches you from the other person’s problem, trapping them in it. The fact (or is it an opinion?) that you had it badly or worse does not make them feel any better or help them solve the problem. Maybe instead you could try:
“I sometimes feel the same and it sucks! Would you like to try and read it together? Maybe if I read it aloud to you? Maybe if you read it aloud to yourself?”
Another idea worth exploring would be to set up sessions when students must try and “imitate” the feelings or reactions of others in difficult situations? Teach them to ask questions about someone else’s condition rather than judge or “contribute” with their own problems. Give them a list of problems that are similar to those faced by their peers. Ask them to come up, not with solutions to their problems, but with ways to express how they must feel. Help them with the vocabulary needed through the use of a thesaurus or online corpora.
Help them recognise and express the Universal feelings of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and happiness through sample pictures of people from different eras and areas expressing them. Follow one of the many sites that offer ideas on how to teach students to express their feelings, like “10 Activities to Help Students Explore Emotions” by Apperson Team.
Regardless of what future technologies may help us do in the future (even if the future is really now) students stand a better chance of achieving success and happiness when they are able to understand how they feel. A techno-free world may not be possible, or even desirable, but it should not stop us from finding ways to express our emotions and react to those of other people. What better profession to help people achieve that, than the one of those whose vocation it is to enable them to use the language; the one that we hold as language teachers!
Coleman, A. (2008). A Dictionary of Psychology (3 ed.). Oxford University Press.
Ekman, P. (2003) Emotions RevealedNew York: Henry Holt and Company
Brown, B. (2013) The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection, & Courage. Audio CD published by Sounds True,
Karpouzis K. (Jan 17, 2016) A selfie with a robot! | TEDxUniversityofMacedonia, Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-BKlUwjK7w
Apperson Team (May 26th, 2016) 10 Activities to Help Students Explore Emotions, Retrieved from http://www.apperson.com/teach-talk/10-activities-to-help-students-explore-emotions
Please check the Practical uses of Technology in the English Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Practical uses of Mobile Technology in the English Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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