Keywords

Introduction

In the current era of education where there is so much emphasis on cognitive educational outcomes and accountability, it can be difficult to recognize the importance of affect in learning science. Today, much of the public debate about and rationale for education sees the very basis of that education being best captured by accounts of instructional efficiencies, curriculum statements, lesson plans, and public records of pupils’ performance. This is at best only a partial picture, and in such an era, we need to be vigilante in reminding ourselves of this. What is abundantly clear from research and practice is that affect has considerable influence over what happens in the classroom. Some emotions (such as joy, happiness, pleasure, delight, thrill, zeal, and gladness) act to potentially enhance learning and optimize student enjoyment and achievement, while other emotions (such as sorrow, boredom, sadness, distress, regret, gloom, misery, and grief) can close down concentration, deaden curiosity, and insight and in so doing can suppress learning. The affective and emotional encounters and relationships that we develop within pedagogies and with knowledge are profoundly and deeply important. Indeed, some would go as far as to say that they actually make science education possible (Alsop 2005).

Such an assertion is not really controversial. After all, there is overwhelming evidence from a diversity of academic fields and professional practices that teaching and learning are complex, both individually and particularly in their interactions. The focus here is on the mutually constitutive nature of cognition and affect. This may seem a small point; however, it is a shift in perspective with far-reaching consequences. In recognizing the importance of affect in knowing and knowledge, we start to dispel the view that science and science education is, can be, or ought to be based on reason alone. There is a long associated history, of course, in which affect is framed as mainly undesirable, as a potential obstacle to enlightened, objective thought (especially in science). In departing from this history and holding onto the importance of affect, we open up profound questions of objectivity and subjectivities, questions that more often than not accompany popular Western narratives of mind and body duality. There are legitimate arguments that such a departure leads one to a history of science that is more consistent with the practices of sciences than history often seeks to represent.

Affect has become represented by so many diverse theories and methodologies: Darwinism, Jamesian, cognitive and socio-constructive, phenomenological, neurological, psychoanalytical, and many other perspectives as well. These each bring languages, analytical categories, modes, and methods of explorations. In the history of science education, we have been drawn to a particular personal psychological perspective and have placed sustained attention on explorations of the construct of attitudes toward science. This significant and thoughtful body of work is the subject of another entry; so it is mentioned only in passing here.

Affect in Science Education

Studies of attitudes toward science have now been joined by a growing number of studies that adopt more situated perspectives in which affect is studied within particular contexts and settings. Such studies accentuate the situated nature of affect, stressing that emotions are always grounded in personal, social and cultural contexts. Of course, studies of attitudes are themselves set within particular contexts and times, and they often reference these within their methods. Today, attention is more commonly placed on studying learning embedded within identified and identifiable science education environments, such as school classrooms and laboratories. Studies of affect in science education (a term that is used here to denote these studies) are theoretically wide ranging and empirically diverse. Some researchers, for instance, attend to particular motivational constructs including self-efficacy, interest, task value, and achievement goals. These constructs have established definitions and lineage within particular educational learning theories. They have become firmly associated with enhanced learning outcomes. In particular educational settings, researchers explore the mediatory and moderating effects of such constructs with an overarching goal of better understanding how and why some instructional practices and approaches might be more efficacious than others. Here, for instance, emphasis could be placed on personal and environmental interactions as represented by interactions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (see Bonney et al. 2005).

Other researchers focus on specific instructional practices and processes. In these cases, affect is evoked as a vital consideration in understanding the relative advantages (or disadvantages) of some pedagogies – such as “hands-on” laboratory or practical work, animal dissections, inquiry-based learning, drama and role play, computer-based learning, and science field trips as well as many out-of-school activities. In particular instructional contexts, studies of pupils’ emotions, and conceptual understandings employ a diversity of methods but are unified in stressing the importance of positive affect for deeper, more meaningful, and longer-lasting learning. Studies deploy a wide range of different measurements as a means to comment on the effectiveness (or otherwise) of instructional practices and innovations. Studies of free-choice learning and learning within informal contexts – to give very high profile examples – consistently highlight the importance of affect for learning. Indeed, affective considerations such as “interest,” “curiosity,” and “fun” are now widely assumed as an essential part of lifelong learning encounters with science.

There is a literature in science education in which affect is conceived more as an outcome rather than, or as well as, a process. In such cases, the goal of a learning encounter might be evaluated predominately in affective terms (such as building a positive relationship with science). Learning encounters with science can be seen in emotional developmental terms, using constructs such as Emotional Intelligence (EI), Emotional Quotient (EQ), or emotional well-being. EI and EQ are both associated with best selling popular texts, and there are a series of widely available standardized EI and EQ tests. Although these constructs remain controversial, in some educational jurisdictions, they can be appealing (particularly within associated discussions of character education and civic education).

Perrier and Nsengiyumva (2003) study of affect has a distinctive outcome focus of therapeutically reclaiming a sense of self as an “affective being.” Set within the context of post-genocide Rwanda and extreme trauma, these pedagogues turn to inquiry-based science as a means to open up channels of communication, play, and joy. The predictability and safety of gathering biology and physics data offer a platform (they persuasively demonstrate) to restore and build learner’s self-actualization and relationships with others. As the authors’ note of their practice, “the most important goal, indeed, is not the quality of the scientific message or the pedagogy: the most important is whether the activities contribute to an actualization of the being” (p. 1123). Although this study was conducted nearly a decade ago, this account remains a powerful example of the potentially far-reaching emotional effects of science education.

Affect of Science Education

In the examples above, emphasis has been placed mainly on the socio-psychological; the focus has been on individuals within particular educational contexts and practices. There are a modest number of studies in which affect is framed more as a sociocultural or poststructural construction with particular social, cultural, and political origins. With this orientation, affect is represented as constitutive with particular cultures and social practices (including language, institutions, social relationships, behaviors, and histories). Research attention is drawn to analyzing these co-constructed educational cultural practices with their associated emotionalities.

Zembylas (2004, p. 301) in a 3-year ethnographic study of an elementary classroom, for example, draws attention to how a teacher’s performance of emotional labor is an important aspect of science teaching. Teachers’ emotional labor and their emotional metaphors function, in part, in creating inspiring cultures for teaching and learning. The teacher is willing to embrace “suffering” in the form of emotional labor because of seemingly “gratifying” emotional rewards. This study highlights teachers’ agency in creating and maintaining socio-emotional cultures.

Orlander and Wichram (2011) study exposes some deep rifts between learners’ lived emotional experiences and some of the sociocultural academic traditions of school-based science education. The focus here is adolescents’ reactions to calf-eye dissections and sex education. The authors persuasively cast this as an instance in which learners’ bodily reactions are central to meaning making in science. It also highlights the emotionally lively nature of some aspects of science education and raises questions of what emotionality is desirable or indeed, undesirable within science education practices.

Cultural and poststructural studies of affect raise significant socio-political questions concerning the emotional rules governing science classroom behavior and underpinning power relations that these rules support. For some time, feminist and postcolonial scholars have drawn attention to the politics of affect, exposing the legacies of Western patriarchal thought and institutional practices. Different authors theorize the political motivations that reinforce the seemingly undesirable nature of some emotions and the worldviews that this presupposes and actively supports. This raises a number of questions for science education, including whose emotionality gets to count in our practices? How? Why? What are the shorter-term and longer-term implications of more dominant emotional traditions for different groups of learners? Are practices in science education failing students because of the particular emotional (or emotion less) forms of knowing that are stressed in teaching? These questions are presently largely under-researched and call for much greater attention in the future.

Affect in Learning Science

As with all attempts to describe learning and education, there are associated theoretical and methodological conundrums. Our narratives of learning are at best partial and serve to illuminate particular aspects whilst leaving others underdeveloped. We make our way in the world through telling stories and these stories also make our worlds. Our primary story in science education is cognition, and we record and rightly celebrate the conceptual performances of learners. Yet there is a clear evidence base that affect and cognition are inseparable and mutually constitutive.

This entry has drawn attention to three broadly different orientations to the study of affect and learning science: attitudes toward science, affect in science education, and affect of science education. These orientations are not offered here as distinctive or categorical, but as illustrative and carry with them an invitation to explore how they might, or might not, be connected. While pupils’ attitudes toward science have been widely documented (often and for many decades presenting worrying trends of decline) there is an open question as to how to best respond. Different authors, quite understandably, offer a wide variety of suggestions and these often make reference to changes in teaching and learning practices. As such, they assume a connection at some level between attitudes and situated experiences. However, much research suggests that individual dispositions and situated experience are very different. Attitudes can develop more slowly; perhaps over a longer period of time, while lived emotional experiences can be short lived, episodic, transitory and more immediate. In a recent study, for instance, Abraham (2009) records an increase in short-term engagement during practical lessons but this does not translate into longer-term changes in students’ interest. One of his recommendations is that researchers need to develop much more realistic understandings of the potential affective benefits of practical work. Indeed, much evidence now suggests that the construct attitudes toward science and more situated studies of affect in science education are not as closely related as is often assumed. For instance, much research paints such a gloomy picture of students’ declining attitudes to science and this is a source of legitimate concern. However, this research cannot be simply extrapolated to conclude that students are regularly having problematic emotional experiences in science lessons. Most science teachers, I am sure, spend considerable time seeking to make their lessons emotionally engaging and enticing.

Similar arguments can be made concerning sociocultural studies of affect (affect of science education). While the emotional natures of our practices remain largely under-researched, these natures raise a number of questions of how they might (or might not) influence learner’s situated experiences and their general dispositions and attitudes toward science. It remains an open question, for instance, as to how ways of feeling that are legitimized and de-legitimized by classroom practices impact (or not) students’ lived classroom experiences. Orlander and Wickram (2011) previously mentioned study serves to demonstrate that dominant cultural traditions can be quite different to pupils’ actual educational experiences. The relationship between what teachers intend students to learn and what they do learn is both dynamic and complex. Exploration of the nature and consequence of possible connections between attitudes toward science, affect in science education, and affect of science education requires greater attention in the future.

Studies of affect also present their own methodological conundrums. The ephemeral, fleeting and episodic nature of situated affect makes it challenging to quantify. Perhaps this is one reason why it is often absent from high profile discussions of school and pupil performance. It now seems like a cliché to say that the ways in which we measure learning influences how learning is both publically and privately conceived and valued. In science education, we have clearly been drawn more to some approaches in the study of affect rather than others. There is an open question of why personal psychological studies have been so appealing and seem so influential in policy and curriculum reforms. The politics of why and how we speak for science education is important.

There has been a sustained interest in a “theory of content” in science education. This is based largely on an assumption that particular content might be best taught and learned in particular ways and in particular social and environmental contexts and settings. Few would disagree that some science content is more provocative and once encountered can arouse intense reactions and equate to particular political allegiances. Other content can, of course, be much more anodyne, dry, and mundane, and this poses its own set of educational dilemmas. Over the past few decades, increasing attention has been placed on socio-scientific issues that are themselves now readily associated with heightened emotions (sometimes grief and loss with apocalyptic dimensions). Global warming and climate change is one such example. Other examples include nanotechnologies, genetically modified foods, and nuclear power and weaponry. Encountering science and technology in these areas raises axiomatic questions of affect and learning. To use a distinction drawn by Bruno Latour, encountering “matters of concern” is likely to be very different than encountering “matters of fact” – a distinction that raises some important pedagogical questions for science education. Traditionally, we have tended to associate difficult knowledge with conceptual demands rather than emotional demands. The emotive power of content still remains largely unexplored. More recently, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has encouraged us to move beyond facts and concerns to reflect on “matters of care” in techno-science and ask: “Who cares?” “Why ought we care?” “How ought we care?” Reactions to climate change, for instance, raise questions of the importance of understanding the science involved but also, perhaps even more importantly, recognizing why, how, where, and with whom we should, or might, care. Although “pedagogies of care” have been a topic of sustained attention in education, they have yet to develop as a major theme of interest in science education and as such offer an intriguing topic for future research.

Recognizing the constitutive nature of cognition and affect (in contrast to more dualistic orientations) raises profound questions central to any considerations of science teaching and learning. As science educators, our pedagogies are at their heart an invitation to invite others into our worlds and experience a subject that has occupied our minds and emotions for such a long time. This invitation carries with it an open prospect of encountering the wonderment, delight, hopes, challenges, and possibilities of seeing the world and ourselves in different ways. Studies of affect hold the potential to simulate a new body of research with fresh insights into the teaching and learning of science. This can have far-reaching implications for practice and this seems even more pressing in an era of truly global concerns.

Cross-References