blog post written by: Carlos Esquivel
A dollar drops in the tin bucket as the young troubadour croons his rendition of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” with guitar and boots to match, but just as you put your twenty dollar bill back into your pocket, you hear the sound of two voices dramatically singing, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” The young couple are also on the street downtown, busking as it’s called, and now they are pulling you into the experience. Whichever performer is bestowed your Facebook post or twitter accolade will be determined by the degree of phenomena that is given and received during the experience.
The same situation happens in classrooms every day as teachers compete for the embattled attention span of our students. Smartphones, sleep deprivation, hunger and many more competitors, are all vying for the precious and finite attention of our audience. We are the buskers and they have all the freedom to choose who will get the dollar in the bucket. So, the curtain rises (the bell rings) and the bright lights are on you. It’s time to create the experience using the affective domain.
The affective domain, one of three domains in Bloom’s Taxonomy, deals with the give and take of phenomena. This domain has various degrees, just like the other domains, but has been overshadowed by the cognitive and even the psychomotor in terms of practice and research. And what is phenomena, anyway? Simply put, it is an occurrence that is experienced by the senses. Phenomena can be simple or complex, basic or deeply profound – a head nod, a smile, gasp, laughter, body language, a raised hand; phenomena is the currency of the affective domain and the truth is that we use it daily in its basic degree of receiving, but can we utilize it better? And are there any benefits to increasing the degree of phenomena in our delivery?
How to utilize this often neglected domain to improve retention
Consider how we sit around a campfire and tell scary stories from our childhood, but who sits at the fire to talk about a math lesson from third grade about division? Ask students to recount the latest scary movie they saw at the theater and they may recount the entire movie if you let them! The connection between emotions and information, in this case, a scary movie, illustrate the concept well. It’s no secret that students love entertainment, we all do. It’s safe to say that adding higher levels of stimulation to our content could increase the attention span, but is there any support for this idea?
Research on the connection includes the ABC theory and an Oxford study on how emotional stimulus affects memory and recall. Arousal Biased Competition (ABC) is a theory suggesting that greater emotional stimulus can cause both a singular focus on salient information and the dismissal of peripheral information in a given moment. The Oxford study uses brain imaging to confirm the findings of the aforementioned ABC theory, concluding that “emotional arousal can enhance activity in visual processing regions.” Concerning memory, “the research states that recent findings also reveal similar ABC effects on long-term memory when arousal is induced by intense positive pictures as when it is induced by intense negative pictures.” (Lee, Sakaki, Cheng, & Velasco, 2014) It would be in our interest to consider how we can incorporate arousing phenomena in the context of creating an experience for our students during our class time. After all, The heart is just as important as the brain.
Guest blogger: Carlos Esquivel is a CTE Print Technology Instructor at Kent Career and Technical Center. He is also a motivational speaker that is passionate about character development using vocational training and the arts. Check out the PBL program he created for his pathway called thefoundry.xyz
The Research Tae-Ho Lee, Michiko Sakaki, Ruth Cheng, Ricardo Velasco, Mara Mather; Emotional arousal amplifies the effects of biased competition in the brain, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Volume 9, Issue 12, 1 December 2014, Pages 2067–2077, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsu015
The Bulletin 