Accepted Papers |
back to list of accepted papers Role of Emotion in Online Learning and Knowledge ProductionDebra Ferreday & Vivien Hodgson download full paper in PDF format One impact of the information explosion in cyberspace is that the value assigned to knowledge has increasingly become seen as something out there to be collected and thus as a possession, or as something that is capable of improving and assisting performance. This operational and functional view of knowledge has come to be seen of greater significance than its ‘truth’ or use value in terms of human progress, understanding and awareness. In the proposed paper, we will explore in more depth some of the processes of knowledge generation within networked learning communities. The production of knowledge through learning networks is implicitly a key process within networked management learning. But what do we mean when we refer to the production of knowledge and what process are being inferred? In the paper we argue that the increased tendency towards seeing knowledge as a possession or commodity has developed alongside a view of social relations that has come to have a similarly commodified perspective. We will focus specifically on the role that emotion plays in the processes of both knowledge production and social relationships Since our work draws on a socio-constructionist view of knowledge, we feel that it is particularly important to understand the social processes that take place within networked learning communities. Whilst much has been written about the role of emotion in organizations, this paper will focus on how existing theories of emotion might be expanded to give a greater understanding of how learning takes place through dialogue and connectivity. These issues are central within a view that takes a social constructionist perspective on learning and knowledge construction, and which assumes knowledge construction occurs during and through processes of relational dialogue. It is, we believe, consequently important to explore the socio-cultural issues that occur within such process of collaborative dialogue. Drawing on examples from a recent empirical ethnographic study of a networked learning programme, we will argue that emotion plays a central role in structuring interaction, identification and dialogue within a networked learning community, and we will examine the impact this appears to have on knowledge production. Specifically, we will reframe existing theories of emotion and affect by developing the idea of connection and disconnection as central to knowledge production within a networked learning community. We argue that specific emotions contribute to the experience of connection within a networked learning community, and that this plays an important part in the construction of knowledge about the world and one’s position in the world. We consider the work of Garcia-Lorenzo (2006) which builds on Wittel’s ideas of network sociality and Cook and Brown’s (1999) work suggesting that knowledge should not be seen as either an attribute or possession of a group/organization or of its individual members but rather as a dynamic and generative process, and as something that is inherently indeterminate and continuously emerging but is always historically and culturally specific. She sees knowledge as participation and claims in her paper:
Seeing knowledge in terms of ‘exchange value’ implies a view where knowledge is seen as being created through processes such as performativity and dialogue. In order to understand how these processes it is necessary to pay closer attention to the social dynamics and processes that take place in learning environments including the emotional dimension experienced. We suggest seeing ‘emotion’ as a single, unified category such as in ‘emotional intelligence’ model fails to engage with the complex emotional and interpersonal dynamics that take place in learning environments. One theorist who addresses this problem is Christine Ingleton (1999), who attributes this unified view of emotion to the Cartesian dualism that underpins Western approaches to education which privileges reason over emotion. This is not to say that we want to invert this, and to privilege emotion over reason. Indeed, the idea that emotion is more ‘authentic’ than reason is itself problematic, as recent research on emotion has shown (Berlant 1997, Ahmed 2004). Nevertheless, we would agree with Ingleton’s argument that emotion has been undervalued and undertheorized despite its centrality to the learning experience. For Ingleton, emotion is intimately connected with the construction of a learner identity, and the key emotions she focuses on in this respect are pride and shame. In the paper we suggest that it is useful to reframe the pride/shame dynamic suggested by Ingleton and others. It is possible to do this by returning to Tomkins’ model of affect. For Tomkins, all emotions originate from a primary affect, which is seen simply as a response either towards, or away from, an object. The charged categories of pride and shame can be seen in this way: rather than fixed categories, they can be seen as one way of thinking about emotion as a means of being connected or disconnected. For our purposes, then, it is more instructive to think about how emotion contributes to the complex processes of connection and isolation that characterise the networked learning experience. The paper will conclude by suggesting, on the basis of our study, it appeared to be possible, as the result of processes that enabled learners to experiment with different ways of constructing and performing identity, for a learning community/group slowly to shift from an individualized identity, to one which was more identified with the group: in other words, gave them the space to construct a ‘leaner’ identity. Ultimately, the success of these processes depended on creating a space which allowed individual emotions to surface, as well as creating a sense of belonging and pride within the group or sub-groups. By encouraging the circulation of both academic and personal knowledge in this way, we identified activities and processes that enabled students to connect in a different with one another, thus creating the potential for new knowledge to be constructed. References Berlant, L. (1997) The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Durham, Duke University Press. Cook, S.D.N. and Brown J.S. (1999) ‘Bridging Epistemologies; The generative dance between organizational knowledge and knowing’, Organization Science 10(4), 381-400. Garcia-Lorenzo, L. (2006) ‘Networking in Organizations: Developing a Social Practice Perspective For Innovation and Knowledge Sharing in Emerging Work Context’, World Futures 62(3), 171-192. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E and Frank, A (1995) 'Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2. , pp. 496-522. Ingleton, C. (1999) ‘Emotion in Learning: A Neglected Dynamic’, HERDSA Annual International Conference, Melbourne. Tomkins, S.S. (1995) Exploring Affect: the Collected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, Cambridge University Press. Wittel, A. (2001) ‘Towards a Network Society’, Theory, Culture and Society 18(6), 51-76.
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updated 20 March 2007 |
