Journal entry for MdS 3001W

  Dirkx argues that the role of emotions in adult education has been misunderstood. As he points out, educational efforts emphasize the use of facts and reason. Emotions are seen then, as nothing more than a motivator for or distraction from learning. Dirkx, on the other hand, argues that emotions play a central role in adults' ways of knowing.
   Both the environment and the subject matter can cause strong emotional reactions in adult learners. Dirkx believes that these emotional impacts are the key to meaningful learning by adults. Key to his theory is the idea that these emotions are windows into "images" that exist inside our consciousness. These images serve as a sort of gateway into our inner world, as the way we are able to understand our experiences and make sense of the world around us.
   By beginning to focus on the images that guide our lives, we gain understanding of them, and their sway power over us becomes less one-sided. If we are able to enter into a conscious dialog with these images, we can shape our images just as they shape our emotions and feelings. This allows us to have a deeper understanding of those aspects of ourselves, and a more satisfying relationship with the people and world around us.
   Dirkx sets the bar for adult education extremely high. Certain topics are conducive to emotional and imaginal learning. I think that expecting that most classes covering most topics can apply the concepts explored in Dirkx's article is problematic. Dirkx gives examples of students who have an emotionally charged reaction to returning to an academic setting. If that reaction occurs in a class like MdS 3001W, that may be a great opportunity to use emotional learning to explore the issue. However, if that same emotion arises in a physics lecture, the idea of emotions as a distraction from learning seems to fit better.
   Many of the ideas Dirkx develops ring very true to me. Making an effort to be introspective, to try to examine the images, or lenses, that shape our view of the world, seems an enormously valuable exercise. His explorations of the processes and benefits involved are thorough and clear. But, he never makes clear how these types of experiences could be generated in learning environments that don't naturally lend themselves to emotion and imagination.