Visceral Pedagogy: Teaching Challenging Topics Emotionally as Well as Cognitively

Abstract

This article explores the pedagogical implications of students' embodied and emotional reactions to difficult course material inside and outside of the classroom. Scholarship on teaching typically focuses on dimensions of students' cognitive engagement and development, yet geographical coursework often involves emotionally fraught topics: environmental cataclysm, poverty, inequality, oppression, (ill) health, etc. Instructors who anticipate their students' emotional experiences will be able to better engage with and use these experiences toward learning goals. Some topics may be most effectively taught through emotionally activated learning activities, prompting reflection on the role of visceral learning experiences in higher education.

Key Words:

• visceral pedagogy
• emotional pedagogy
• cognition
• course design

Notes

1. The first author of this article is a faculty member and instructor of the courses described in the text; the second author is a former graduate student and was a pedagogical observer for the second iteration of the class. In this article, we use the term “I” when describing the first author's process of planning and teaching, and “we” in describing our shared authorial perspective in reflecting on those experiences and on the broader literature.

2. Although we articulate cognition and emotion as distinct embodied processes in this article (Pinker 1999), we understand these two categories as heuristic rather than absolute ones, which help in analyzing various dimensions of the holistic visceral experience.

3. Because the course was not designed experimentally and students were not asked for permission to share their work—and perhaps especially because their responses were at times more personal than might be typical—this article reports on teaching and observational experiences of students and our synthetic views of the cohorts' classroom responses. The intervention is intended to be preliminary and provocative rather than conclusive, based on our teaching experience and reflection on a lack of attention to such pedagogical approaches in the existing literature. We hope to motivate evidence-based research on best practices in the future.

4. While we note the higher-performing average character of the second honors-biased cohort, because this class was not designed experimentally, at this point we consider characterizations of the causes of differentiated modes of learning engagement between cohorts suggestive.

5. The curricular choice to include overseas examples early in the semester seemed to help the classroom dynamic in this regard: students were able to scaffold the learning process while examining contexts where their relative emotional distance from the subject was more similar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Pierce

Joseph Pierce is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. His current research is focused on strategies of urban resistance and the use of community land trusts in neighborhood development.

Holly Widen

Holly Widen received her Ph.D. in geography at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. Her recent work has focused on developing innovative methods to improve assessments of tornado risk and vulnerability in the United States, and she is passionate about enhancing her pedagogical skills.