In the learning environment, emotions can play a powerful role in supporting or undermining learning and teaching. Emotions are an embodied response to a stimulus (whether real or perceived, external or internal) and are experienced along a continuum from positive to negative.

Principle 4: Interactive learning: more than teamwork makes the dream workĮmotions play a role in how and why students learnĮducators and students need to acknowledge the integral role that emotions have in learning.

Principle 2: Contextual learning: linking learning to the real world.

Principle 1: Learning as becoming: what do students become as a result of their HE experience?.

In this third article in our series covering the seven principles in the Higher Education Learning Framework, we look at emotions and learning in detail. When educators understand the role that emotions play in learning and teaching, and how individual and shared emotional states can influence the dynamic of the learning environment and experience, they can design more effective learning experiences. Whether in a face-to-face or online environment, the emotional states of learners – and teachers – can influence one another. Emotions can also be contagious, with strong positive or negative emotional states infecting others in the learning environment.

Emotions can both enhance and interfere with learning depending on which ones are driving or colouring the experience.

Principle touch bounce