The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching

Elsie Osborne, Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, Gianna Williams, Elsie Osborne, Isca Salzberger-Wittenberg, Gianna Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429920615
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book aims to heighten the awareness of the emotional factors which enter into the process of learning and teaching. It is based on the work done by the authors with a group of teachers who attended the Tavistock Clinic for a course called Aspects of Counselling in education.

Part I


Beginnings

I. Salzberger-Wittenberg

Chapter 1

Hopeful and fearful expectations

A new year, a new job, a new baby; the beginning of a new relationship, a book, a course of study - eagerly we turn to each new event with expectant hope. Untried, unsullied, it holds the promise of meeting some need as yet unmet, the fulfilment of desires as yet unfulfilled, the ideal we have never given up searching for. Unless, of course, past disillusionment has blunted our capacity for hope, made us fearful of risking disappointment yet again. But, however hopeful our anticipation, we also harbour fears about the future. ‘Aller Anfang ist schwer’ (every beginning is hard) says the wise German proverb, pointing to the uncertainty and doubts which tend to beset us. Will the new job be a failure, the course worthless, the new year bring disease and death, the journey end in disaster, the new baby be a monster? And in a less extreme vein: will they bring the same frustrations and difficulties that we have encountered before and had hoped to escape from? It is of the nature of beginning that the path ahead is unknown, leaving us poised as we enter upon it between wondrous excitement and anxious dread.

As I begin to write this book, I am filled with some degree of expectant hope; yet I am mainly burdened by the weightiness of the task that lies ahead. Empty pages face me as my mind is alternately a blank and in a state of chaos. Will, out of this uncertainty and confusion, any thoughts emerge, ideas be clothed into meaningful phrases, will they form themselves into some order? Do I have anything worthwhile to contribute? But as I reflect upon this despair, I become aware that these doubts and agonies are part and parcel of beginning, are the essence of any creative work. And then a somewhat reassuring thought occurs: ‘I do have a basis in experience, something to start this chapter with.’ I have recently been confronted with a group of teaching staff from primary, secondary and tertiary education beginnning a course at the Tavistock on Aspects of Counselling in Education.

A group of fifty strangers faced me this month at the start of the academic year. Lots of them sat bunched at the back, few had the courage to occupy the front rows. Someone arrived late noisily pushing past with a large shopping basket and was met by disapproving glances from those who had come on time. Some late-comers edged their way in shyly, attempting not to be noticed, while others apologised profusely. I was conscious of these happenings as I gave my introductory talk on the aims of the course. But I became increasingly aware of the tenseness of the people in front of me, the cursory glances around the room, faces turned towards me without appearing to comprehend. So I gave up the pursuit of my lecture and took hold of the moment. It occurred to me that as the course is intended to heighten awareness of what students and teachers feel in their respective situations, perhaps this aim would be best served if we started in the here and now, considering what it is like to enter a strange building, meet a group of strangers, begin a course. I took a risk and asked the group to comment on what they felt like, but to my relief they were keen enough to meet the challenge, after I had explained that I had no wish to intrude on their privacy but hoped that reflecting upon their own experiences would be a useful way of learning about such matters.

‘I felt embarrassed coming in late, I thought you might be angry,’ said one.

‘I thought that there was no chair left for me, that would have been the last straw,’ said another. Soon others expressed their feelings:

‘I feel lost and confused.’ ‘So do I; the receptionist told me where to go but I twice opened the wrong door, this is such a big and frightening place.’

‘I was relieved when you entered and took control, I thought being in a large group without a leader was frightening.’

‘One does not know what is expected of one, so one waits for others to say something.’

‘I feel exposed.’

‘I have been teaching for many years, I’m afraid I’ll find out that I have had the wrong ideas about children, that the course will shake my beliefs.’

‘I feel ignorant and stupid and I wonder why I have been chosen. How do you select people for this course?’

‘One feels so alone amongst strangers, I was looking around to see if there might be someone I know.’

‘I feel isolated and want to be near someone for comfort - did you put the chairs close together for that reason?’

‘When I read the printed information sheet, I felt it implied some secret authority watching one.’

‘I wonder what rules and controls you have here?’

‘I wonder what’s hidden behind the door.’

‘I don’t know what you are all talking about, I am just keen and interested.’

‘When I first came in, I thought how cold and dull this place was - I find it brighter now.’

Does it seem surprising that these statements were made, not by young children, not by 18-year-old college students, but by a group of senior teaching staff who found themselves at the beginning of a new experience. Nor was this group in any way unusual, except in their willingness to scrutinise their feelings and their honesty in reporting the findings. Of course, everyone knows about feelings of insecurity, but we tend to pay lip-service to these, hide them, ignore them or ride rough-shod over them. Certainly, our group of teachers was amazed at the acuteness and intensity of their experience. We realised that the anxieties were far more numerous and powerful at the beginning yet, having verbally expressed and shared these, there was a more positive feeling that the situation wasn’t perhaps as bad as all that. For the acknowledgment of fears leads us to test them against reality, allows us to bring them within the surveyance of the more mature part of the personality. Instead of being overwhelmed or denying their existence, we can recognise them as a legitimate part of ourselves and utilise our adult capabilities to deal with the situation.

The purpose of engaging the teachers in such scrutinisation of their here and now experience was neither a therapeutic one nor a model setting intended to be used in school situations. It simply provided an opportunity for learning from experience that such feelings, which we usually relegate to infants and very young children, are indeed ubiquitous, that such anxieties continue to exist to some degree in all of us throughout life. Knowing about them from within ourselves increases our perceptiveness and understanding of others. It made the group of teachers identify and sympathise with those they taught, aware in a renewed affective way of what it might be like on the first day, whether at primary or secondary school, at university or adult education centre. They began to ask themselves how little we take this into account in caring for those who stand at the beginning, where the new unknown situation tends to cause all sorts of frightening ideas to float up from the depths of the mind.

We also know in theory that we cannot pay attention to what is said when our minds are preoccupied. All the same it came as a shock to realise that well over a half of my short introductory remarks had not been heard at all, so dominant had been the affective experience of being a newcomer on a course, in a new group, in a strange institution, and the need to find means of combating the anxieties aroused. What had been heard had mostly been misunderstood and only a negligible amount of what had correctly been taken in was subsequently retained. It made us aware how a child finding himself in a large classroom might at first be too bewildered to pay any attention to the lesson. It made one wonder about the meaningfulness of assemblies at the beginning of a school year and large gatherings of college entrants. Whatever other useful functions they may serve, such as demonstrating corporateness or the authority of the staff group, as a means of imparting anything but the most elementary information, they seem at best a waste of time - at worst to heighten confusion and anxiety. When our mind is filled with anxiety, we need to find an outlet for our feelings, to express them in words or actions, find some comfort. If we are given none of these chances we tend to withdraw into ourselves or find other ways of escaping from the overwhelming experience. It was observed by a very perceptive teacher that some people had folded their arms as if to hold onto themselves and erect a barrier between themselves and their neighbour. Another teacher said that he’d found himself touching his mouth, then lit a cigarette to control his anxiety and comfort himself. Note that there were both physical and mental components active in this new situation - a feeling of coldness, of trembling, of wanting something in the mouth like a baby clinging to the breast, an arm around to comfort oneself and keep out something dangerous. These matters are very rarely talked about because we regard them as totally out of keeping with our perception of ourselves as adults, we tend to ignore such observations because we find it shameful and embarrassing to face them in ourselves and others.

Even quite young children tend to be ashamed of revealing how frightened they are in a new situation, and mobilise their most grown-up capacity to help them: ‘I have a train at home just like that one,’ said 3-year-old Tony, holding tightly onto the one familiar object in the unfamiliar surroundings of his new nursery. By finding something known he could, to some extent, deny the difference between nursery and home, between here and there. On his first day at school, 5-year-old Peter announced, ‘I am a big brave boy now, my little brother is just a silly baby, he cries when mummy leaves him.’ Being afraid to be lost, abandoned, confused is felt to be ‘just a silly baby’, something to be despised, and out of harmony with the school child’s view of himself as grown-up and independent. Yet given the chance to speak about such feelings by an understanding teacher, children will confide. I was told by a headmaster that he regularly puts aside some time during the first two weeks of the academic year for his 11-year-old new boys to talk about their feelings. It was astounding to him to discover how free they felt once they were encouraged to do so, to talk to him. Most of them said they would never tell mummy and daddy, some tell granny or grandad how they are feeling about coming to school, and hardly any of them dared to tell their older brothers or sisters for fear of being laughed at. Mostly they chose pets; as one boy put it, ‘I whispered it all into my cat’s ears.’ And what is the kind of thing that you can only confide to pets? Matters like: ‘I was terrified of the teacher and the headmaster especially. I thought I might be examined, cut open like in an operation and that all the mess inside will show.’ ‘I was frightened of the other boys, I thought they’d be bullies.’ ‘I couldn’t sleep last night, in my dream there was a whole crowd shooting at me.’ ‘I thought I’d be failed, not found to be good enough for this school.’ As adults we consider that we have, or should have, totally outgrown such baby feelings, and that if we have not there must be something wrong with us.

The roots in infancy

It is of course true that these feelings are child-like, but we tend to treat them in a derogatory way as childish or babyish. By child-like I mean that such anxieties have their roots in our childhood and infancy. What the psycho-analytic study of the mind has shown is that experiences right from the beginning of life, and in fact the earlier back they go the more powerful their influence, remain with us in the depths of the mind throughout our lives, and are re-evoked in any situation that in any way resembles the past. This is often not in any conscious sense of remembering what it felt like; it is rather that there is a memory in feeling (as Melanie Klein called it), in our bodily and emotional states or phantasies. Thus any new situation re-awakes the feelings of being pushed out at birth from a familiar environment into one that is cold, strange and terrifying. The event of birth is perhaps the greatest change that we ever have to face, a change from a fluid environment where we are automatically fed and held within the warmth of the womb, to being outside in cold aerial boundariless surroundings where the newborn has to take over some of the physical functions. Unlike other creatures, human beings are born extremely helpless. It is this helplessness which intensifies extreme fear, nay terror. It will be helpful if this transition is made less terrifying by a warm, holding environment. The French doctor, Leboyer, has demonstrated how this dramatic experience can be made less traumatic by trying to, at first, re-create as much of the internal situation as possible. This includes providing warm physical contact by putting the baby on the mother’s stomach before the cord is cut, allowing the baby to be fed as soon as possible, and immersing the newborn in a bath while gently massaging him. It is fascinating to watch on film how this reduces the fearful cry of the newborn and enables him to gradually relax and explore the world around him. It is helpful if the mother goes on introducing the world into the baby’s life ‘in small doses’, as Dr Winnicott put it. While good experiences lay the foundation to hope that we will be helped in the process of facing painful transitions, extreme anxiety states do remain as memory traces within all of us. For any new situation involves loss of the old, known one. They are particularly likely to be re-awakened by sudden or extreme changes. The more unstructured and strange a new situation, the further we are removed from what is familiar physically, mentally or emotionally, the more disorientated and terrified we tend to feel.

But surely, you will say, unlike the baby the adult and even the child has knowledge and ability to put against his fears of being helpless, lost and confused. When he is frightened he can move away from danger, he has physical strength to defend himself, he can ask for directions, find his way back to some helpful person. And of course only in extreme situations of stress do most of us experience anything approaching the extremes or the panic of infancy. How well someone can deal with a new situation will depend on a store of good experiences in his mind; in as far as he has come to trust mother and father, and is able to hold on to such good helpful figures in their absence, he can tolerate being left on his own. On the basis of good internalised experiences we can dare to extend ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally, to venture forward and explore new people, new places, new situations - the unknown. It is true also that every added skill and every successfully negotiated task gives us some confidence in meeting a new situation. Thus a child of three is usually more dependent on the service of his parents and hence bound to feel correspondingly more afraid when he finds himself on his own, than a 16-year-old or an adult student.

But however mature and capable we are, we continue to harbour some dread of helplessness, of being lost, overcome with fear of disintegration. Even if we have mastered other like situations, we dread that our abilities will not be adequate this time or to this situation. It would seem that at every turning point we feel threatened with not knowing where we are, what we are, who we are. We need to test, and fear to test, whether our painfully acquired internal equipment, which is the basis of our sense of self, will stand up to the new experience or alternatively whether the boundary of the self will disintegrate under the impact of the strange situation. For we have come to know ourselves not in isolation, but in relation to others, to the known faces and surroundings; in the first instance in relation to a mother who knew and understood us. We are afraid that we may lose knowing ourselves, our identity, when all familiarity has gone and we dare to risk being face to face with the unknown. The more unfamiliar and unstructured the situation we find ourselves in, the further we are removed from home-ground physically, mentally or emotionally, the more terrified and disorientated we tend to feel. We are afraid that, like once long ago, we might again be overwhelmed by experiencing helplessness, chaos, panic at being projected into a strange, separate existence.

Thus student teachers also are extremely vulnerable to being frightened of being in charge of a class. They, like a new mother or father, need support of one another and elders to face this situation. In addition to taking on a very responsible task, their own infantile anxieties are re-awakened by the children they care for. Whenever we are required to perform a new task, we may fear that, whatever we have achieved in the past, our internal store of knowledge and skills might have got lost meanwhile. We cannot even ever be sure of being able to produce a similar piece of work again whether this be an essay, a speech, a lecture, or a work of art. A teacher, in facing his new class, is also having an experience of newness and may dread whether he will be up to what this new situation will require of him. While this may be particularly true of a new group that he has to deal with, if he is at all aware of the new challenges, he will go on finding each day a new experience to some extent, and hence each time there will be some anxiety about how he will stand up to the new task. These feelings cannot be avoided, they are an inevitable concomitant of any true beginning. Indeed the negative capability of being in a state of not knowing is a prerequisite for learning and discovery. For if we are too frightened to allow ourselves to be open enough to have an emotional experience of newness we also shut ourselves off from the perception of something different, from discovering anything new, producing anything fresh. If, however, we do not thus rigidify our thinking and affects, we pay the price of the agony of helplessness, confusion, dread of the unknown - of being in a state of beginning once more.

Different kinds of hopes and fears

If we look back on the comments made by the teachers, they seem to me to fall into three categories:

• (a) feeling lost and confused;
• (b) hopes and fears in relation to myself, the person in authority;
• (c )hopes and fears in relation to other members of the group.

I would like to examine each of these in turn and go on to consider how, in the light of these feelings, we manage the psycho-social transitions in educational establishments.

Anxieties about feeling lost

‘I didn’t know where to go...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Beginnings
• Part II Learning to understand the nature of relationships
• Part III Understanding the individual child in the classroom
• Part IV Work with families and professional colleagues
• Part V Endings
• Further reading