2019 Annual Conference

Adult Development

Concurrent Session (45 minutes)

This session explores an alternative, more constructive approach to interpreting and acting on powerful emotionally-laden experiences that arise within difficult dialogues and other adult learning contexts. Participants will apply this perspective to reflect on and reconsider the meaning of their own experiences with affectively charged learning contexts.

This session is intended for all adult educators who seek to foster deep learning with their practices and relationships with adult learners. It is particularly suited for educators who encourage their learners to learn to work across difference and for whom the emergence of difficult dialgoues often characterizes their teaching and learning settings. Among the settings in which this session will be useful are those that foster extensive peer to peer interactions and group work, both online and face to face. In addition, researchers of transformative learning may find this session helpul.

1) Describe the role that emotions can play in difficult dialogues and how they are typically interpreted and understood; 2) Use their understanding of emotionally-laden experiences to interpret a common case scenario; 3) Describe the mytho-poetic perspective to understanding the meaning of emotion-laden experiences; 4) Apply the mytho-poetic perspective to their own emotionally-charged case scenarios.

In recent years, adult educators have placed considerable emphasis on helping learners work across difference by engaging in difficult dialogues about race, gender, and sexuality. For many teachers and learners these dialogues are often experienced as both important emotionally and, at the same time, dysfunctional to the learning context. In this session, we introduce a fundamentally different way of thinking about the role of emotions in adult learning. Using case scenarios generated by session participants, we will make problematic dominant understandings of the meaning of emotionally-laden experiences and reframe what these emotions can represent for teachers and learners. Relying on the idea of emotion as a form of intelligence, we will demonstrate how positive engagement with these affectively charged experiences can lead to deeper and more profound forms of learning and meaning-making as we participate in difficult dialogues and other forms of adult learning. We will make use of audience participation to generate strategies that may foster expressive and reflective approaches that imaginatively embrace these powerful learning dynamics.

We will start with a brief lecturette to set the focus and context of the session. Presenters will then introduce a case scenario and ask the group to identify approaches to addressing the situation. We will then break into small groups and ask them to reflect on their own case scenarios regarding affectively laden learning situations. Following work on these scenarios, we will introduce the mtyhopoetic perspectve as a way of understanding the intelligence of emotions. Based on this second lecturette, we will ask participants to identify reflective and expressive ways of addressing the meaning of these affective-laden experiences.