Today Cole passed along a link to Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) group. I had never heard of CNDLS before, but after taking a look at their website it represents a great model for how teaching centers can embrace the changes to pedagogy technology may bring with a very research-centered approach. I particularly liked the website, both from its visual appeal as well as the organization of information. For instance, the project portfolio section. This provides guests with a great snapshot of all the projects associated with CNDLS, and links to go deeper into specific project cases that might be of interest.
One initiative I particularly like is “Teaching to the whole person“. This initiative sounds very similar to what we aim for here in the Schreyer Institute, but the final bullet caught me by surprise, “addressing the affective and emotional dimensions of student learning“. Unfortunately the CNDLS website doesn’t unpack that statement or provide much more detail or meaning to this. How would you unpack it?
Based on the psychological literature I’ve read, emotion is an affective state. There are other types of affective states, such as mood, which is less intense but more lasting than emotion.
I guess the affective/emotional dimension on CNDLS website may be related to the experiential aspects of teaching/learning (e.g., experiential learning, game/simulation education), which are powerful in eliciting the positive affective states among students.
Traditional classrooms may have focused on teaching/learning through a “cognitive” route. Studies on affective system (mostly done after 90s), however, shows the importance of affect in human learning and decision making.
I would use work like Goleman’s (EQ) to begin unpacking emotional intelligence and look further into Bloom’s taxonomy for unpacking the affective.