In awe of awe

Scholarly interest surrounding the role of emotions in educational contexts has experienced something of a resurgence over the last 20–30 years (Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia 2014). From an earlier emphasis on the cognitive aspects of conceptual change, there grew a realisation that knowing and understanding were also deeply intertwined with affect and emotions – human cognition became increasingly ‘hot’. So when it was accepted that classrooms were places where emotions were baked into the social fabric, efforts began to see if emotions could be harnessed to be supportive of identity, well-being and, of course, student achievement.

Contemporary curriculum documents have not been ignorant of the power of the aesthetic/emotional aspects of learning science (e.g. A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts and core ideas, The Beyond 2000 Report). Indeed, science teaching in the 19^th century was often rationalised based on its quest for truth and beauty in nature according to DeBoer (2000). From this broad palette of affective constructs, it was found that research on attitudes occupied around 62% of articles in this area followed by those on motivation (19%), and interest (15%) with few publications concerned with emotion or aesthetics in science education (Wickman 2017). This situation is arguably regrettable because new research has identified one construct with much potential for (science) learning – awe.

Derived from Old English, it originally meant terror, fear or dread although awe has evolved to express greatness or excellence, especially in the USA, as well as including wonder, respect, reverence, and ‘being overwhelmed’ in other regions. As a biologist, I have felt awe in many different contexts: snorkelling in coral reefs, observing a gastrotrich for the first time, walking on glaciers and admiring their blue-grey lakes, stumbling upon Monotropa in a forest, marvelling at the shapes of haemoglobin and vitamin B-12 as well as the hand-coloured plates from old zoological catalogues, to name but a few. Such experiences are not unique, and it is not far from the truth that every natural history book or documentary is, in fact, an attempt to invite its audiences to experience awe. But experiencing it need not be confined to travelling to incredible spaces, witnessing rare spectacles or doing ‘sciency stuff’ because music, art, sport, dance, ritual, and religious practices are also commonly cited occasions for feeling this same way (Keltner 2024).

As those who study affect or emotions in science education will tell us (Tytler and Ferguson 2023), it has been challenging to make sense of a complex human emotion like awe. Most researchers generally fall into one of two camps (Wickman 2017): those adopting an analytic approach seek precision and reliability in/for measurement whereas those taking a synthetic approach regard affect and emotions as open-ended social constructions strongly tied to activity, language, and contexts. It follows that there exists a veritable thesaurus of terms that are associated even with the most quotidian emotion such as anger (e.g. mad, rage, furious, fuming, indignant, wrathful, exasperated, choleric, seeing red etc.). Thus, choosing an appropriate label for an emotion can pose enormous challenges for researchers. Without denying the complexity of the topic, awe is generally considered as an epistemic emotion. The latter are activated when people are engaged in sense-making during cognitive activities; that is, when they are performing problem-solving or epistemic work to gain knowledge (Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia 2014).

Moreover, individuals who experience awe will typically report i) a sense of vastness (e.g. of size, volume, intricacy, importance) and, ii) the need to reconcile or accommodate the former to re-establish personal meanings (Keltner and Haidt 2003). In this, awe retains a transformative yet dual nature: it can trigger positive emotions like surprise, interest or curiosity, as well as shift focused attention on others and their needs over oneself. On the other hand, it may also lead to negative feelings of fear, confusion, scepticism, and anxiety. In this journal, Stenlund, Tibell and Schönborn (2022) exemplify these two features of awe. These authors reported how students they interviewed expressed awe, confusion, and surprise, as learners interacted with an immersive visualisation of the tree of life, especially with respect to evolutionary time and biological interconnectedness of life. Other science educators have explored how pedagogy that integrates awe may be used by teachers for ‘motivating students to want to know more about science, enhancing understanding of the nature of science, and promoting life-long appreciation of science and discovery’ (Jones et al. 2022, 2486). Gottlieb, Keltner and Lombrozo (2018) clearly identified awe as a scientific emotion because the process of accommodation where ideas are revised is similar to the process of scientific reasoning and theory change. In addition, this emotion was found to be positively associated with thinking scientifically, with this particular association not being shared by other positive options. The experience of awe therefore ‘predicts a more accurate understanding of how science works, rejection of creationism, and rejection of unwanted teleological explanations more broadly’ (Gottlieb, Keltner, and Lombrozo 2018, 2081). Just based on these few studies, it is already difficult not to be enthusiastic about this up-and-coming emotional construct for assisting formal and informal science education (Price et al. 2021).

I end by suggesting two possibilities where feelings of awe may positively impact biology teaching:

• Awe can be the basis of a number of intersubjective experiences within a classroom learning community, as many other researchers have pointed out. While different people may see and value awe in different ways, a common base experience of vulnerability, interest, and openness that comes with awe can make such occasions potential starting points for joint exploration. Such a perspective harkens to a functionalist view of emotions where they serve to help bind individuals to others and thus be able to collectively respond to challenges.

• Environments where awe is welcomed would likely reach out to typically marginalised or disinterested students, which is related to the previous point. I can relate an incident when I once invited a talented, but notoriously disruptive student to expose a large slab of fossil fish that I owned. I do not have proof, but I like to think that the weeks he spent working with unusual concentration (& silence) were due to the fact that he was uncovering something that was buried since the Eocene. Engagement, motivation, and awe were very likely immanent here.

The good news is that we do not have to intentionally create a fresh curriculum, embark on more field trips or explicitly add in more awe experiences, although such things may be done (Jones et al. 2022). Instead, biology as a subject is already shot through with numerous opportunities for experiencing awe together in the classroom, even though this might vary across topics (see Oberman in press). Biologists are, therefore, really spoilt for choice to make learning come alive through awe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).