Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about working with emotions in higher education. This has partly been prompted by learning about the fear, sadness, grief and anger many teachers and students feel when reflecting on the climate and nature emergencies. I’ve also been thinking about the emotions we experience as professionals in higher education systems trying to teach wicked problems in settings shaped by neoliberlism and new public management.

Some teachers of wicked problems in higher education are uncomfortable working with emotion in the classroom because of genuine concerns about harm to students’ mental health. Other teachers won’t have had any professional development relating to working with emotion in the classroom. Then some will be feeling overwhelmed themselves, or will feel that their workload models don’t allow time for this kind of work with students.

These are all valid concerns but I don’t think we can let this stop us making space for emotion in our classrooms. We have no way of preventing our students experiencing the fear that comes with the climate emergency, for example, and I think it’s better students come to those experiences knowing their teachers were willing to face that together with them. Emotions are there already when we teach any wicked problems, whether or not we welcome them or make them explicit. Wicked problems by definition involve contradictory value positions and they will usually be entangled with social injustices and trauma experienced by teachers and students. The idea that we can maintain a soley rational knowledge-focused stance in the wicked problems classroom is also a stance of extreme privilege. If you don’t ever feel excluded, angry, sad or retraumatised when teaching about wicked problems then you are very very fortunate. Most of the people in the majority world have been experiencing existential threat and social injustice in relation to wicked problems for hundreds of years. If you’re not there yet you’re in the privileged few.

So what can we do to welcome emotion in the classroom in ways that support learners, teachers and learning? Some of the changes needed here are structural, including properly valuing emotional work in higher education and having reasonable workload models and class sizes. I’m not going to dig into that in this blog. Instead I’ll make a few starting suggestions for teachers:

1. Being open about your own emotions is a great place to start, athough I realise not all teachers will be positioned in ways that make this equally safe. If you can say even a few words in a lecture about how strongly you feel about one of the topics, you make it a more welcoming place for students’ own feelings.
2. One strategy that may help prevent strong emotions from derailing other aspects of learning is to have a ‘parking lot’. I’ve watched a few teachers do this where they tell participants that they expect strong emotions about a topic and want to acknowledge them by recording them on a flipchart but want to move the session towards coming up with responses to wicked problems, rather than staying only with emotions. Then they listen actively, respond, and write the emotional topics down before taking other activities foward.
3. Involve students in actions to respond to the wicked problems you’re teaching. Shared action is one of the best ways to foster hope and mutual support. This could start small, maybe developing an Open Educational Resource together. It may not need to be within the classroom, students could be encouraged to reflect on what sorts of action suit their strengths and how they could get involved with activism beyond the University.
4. Take time at the start of blocks of smaller group teaching to develop shared ground rules for a supportive learning environment and to acknowledge that students from different backgrounds may well have very different emotional experiences of topics.
5. Let students know in advance what might come up in teaching sessions, both topics and forms of learning activities. Explain how students can step away from learning experiences that are too difficult for them at that time. Make sure all students are aware of the support services available to them.
6. I’ve been reading the Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators recently and that’s full of sample activities for working with emotion and wicked problems. I recommend it.

Image by Vel McCune taken at Jupiter Artland CC BY-NC 2.0