The Origin Story

In the Fall of 2012, I got involved in a research collaborative at my institution.  The focus of this research collaborative is the social and emotional dimensions of teaching and learning (SEDTL).  The biggest project that I needed to do this year as part of my participation was to engage in redesigning my course in some way.  I decided to be more conscientious about the social and emotional dimensions of literacy, in particular, reading and writing.

This is the logistical side of the story, the stripped down, logical, decision-making chain part of the story.  I honestly had embarked on this journey taking a completely functional approach to the research.  I appreciated the ideas of social and emotional dimensions of teaching and learning.  I thought they were abstractly important.  I was excited to be working with colleagues on a substantial and meaningful project.  But I don't think I really anticipated what such an engagement meant.

My involvement in the project really pushed my thinking about teaching and learning.  It made me start to articulate what exactly SEDTL was and what it might look like in the classroom.  The environment to discuss and actually reflect upon my teaching highlighted for me how important and central the social and emotional aspects of teaching and learning are to my own process.  Throughout my time in school as a student and a teacher, there seems to have been no time for emotions or relating to one another.  Yet, my memories of schooling are tied so viscerally to emotion.  I can recount moments of feeling deep pride or connection.  I can also remember moments of abject humiliation or frustration.  And as  reflect on these moments, I can't automatically associate "good" learning with "good" feelings.  They are more complex and layered.  Certainly "bad" feelings often caused me to shut down and disengage with school.  But there are times when "bad" feelings and my struggle to understand my "bad" feelings led to growth and new learning.

Over the year, I embedded the social and emotional dimensions into some of the class activities.  When we did literature circles, I wanted to consciously talk about and attend to our language use through discussions of literature.  When we did writers workshop, we consciously attended to the emotions through the writing process.  It was powerful.  I'm not at the point where I want to more systematically engage in reflecting on the process and what the embedding of social and emotional dimensions of teaching and learning look like.  Was it just that I had two unusually awesome cohorts to work with?  Or was this year good because of conscientious work we put in?  I suspect it was a little from column A and a little from column B.  This next academic year, I want to put in the time to really study the process of embedding SEDTL into my methods course.  I want to understand what SEDTL looks like in my methods.  I want to see how students are making sense of SEDTL concepts in language arts.  More defined research question to follow.