Moods (Stimmung)

Back in 1980, what has come to be known as " the Dreyfus Skill Model " made its first appearance in a report on skill acquisition in the training of pilots that we (Hubert and Stuart) prepared for the US Air Force. Although our preferred way of formulating the five or six different stages has evolved over the years, one thing has remained unchanged: our conviction that emotional engagement is essential to progressing up the ladder of skill acquisition. 1 Put simply, in order for us to acquire new skills, it has to matter to us how well we are doing in our learning. If we are indifferent to making mistakes and to failing to improve, we will not be receptive to what we can learn from making mistakes. Feeling bad about doing poorly and feeling good about doing well are extremely important for improving at the skill you are learning. But being vulnerable to such emotional vicissitudes can be discouraging to the learner. Feeling bad about doing poorly and failing to advance can often cause learners to hold back from taking risks and striving to improve, stalling them at being an advanced beginner or merely competent. Gloria Flores's work on learning to learn expands upon our work by further elaborating on the kinds of affective responses, what she calls moods, that can show up in each stage of learning (for example, frustration, arrogance, perplexity, ambition, and confidence, to name a few). Many of these emotions may lead to an interruption or abandonment of learning if we are not prepared to recognize and deal with them. Someone averse to failure and the negative emotions and moods it can produce will not advance beyond mere competence. Although such stalling and copping out is a side-effect predicted and described by the Skill Model, in our subsequent work on skill acquisition, we have not pursued the question of how an emotionally engaged learner can navigate and cope with the emotional ups and downs that always come along with learning something new. Gloria's account of the role of moods in learning provides an important missing link between a descriptive insistence upon emotional engagement in learning and a guide for actively coping with the challenging vicissitudes such emotional engagement will involve. The essay below is full of examples of learners succumbing to emotional blocks on their path of learning, whether it is a young child who gives up on learning math, or the media consultant who gives up on learning to play the computer game being used in a teamwork training exercise. Given the emotional dynamics of learning, it is all too easy for a learner to fall into a negative mood like resignation or impatience. Such moods are ways in which the necessary emotional engagement of the learner ironically gets in the way of her learning. One of the key contributions of this essay is the taxonomy of moods that are typically involved in learning a new skill. Together with the account of how one can move out of moods that are obstacles to learning into the ones that are conducive to learning, this taxonomy of moods reveals a path for the learners to become more receptive to what their moods reveal about the progress of their learning process. Such increased sensitivity to the revelatory dimensions of moods can enable learners to use their moods to help them reflect on their learning process, thereby empowering them to propel forward in their learning rather than to submit to emotional vulnerabilities and give up.

Convegno internazionale Università della Tuscia-Viterbo I capricci dell'aria: leggerezza e pensiero nelle arti moderne e contemporanee Da qualche anno, anche a causa dell'origine antropica degli attuali cambiamenti climatici, dell'idea sempre più dibattuta di una crisi ecologica come crisi della sensibilità, dell'emergenza dell'ecocritica