The Emotional Experience of Students

I very much enjoyed reading Dave Beisel’s description of his course and his approach to teaching psychohistory to undergraduates. It is not often that we hear so directly and in such detail about a master teacher’s approach to teaching. I want to briefly touch on two aspects of his report which bear, I think, on effective college teaching in general: attention to process as well as content and attention to the affective experience of students.

While Beisel gives us an idea of the ambitious program of psychohistory content of his course, it is his sensitivity to the group process of the classroom which stands out for me. Unlike the unstructured classrooms Dick Mann, Graham, Gibbard, and I have studied, Beisel’s is a structured class with lectures, discussions, media presentations, and the like. However, he is suggesting that the same affective currents are running in the structured classroom as in the unstructured groups, and that he has to pay attention to them and deal with them in a variety of ways. He is especially sensitive to areas which arouse “resistance” and demonstrates to us ways to deal with it, not as a therapist but as an effective teacher. Sometimes he encourages open discussion and sometimes he sets limits on the students’ intellectual options.

I get a sense from his report, then, that the emotional experiences of the students as they grapple with the subject matter of psychohistory is very much a part of the student’s intellectual experience. Beisel is aware of this, encourages emotional exploration, but has a firm hand on its limits and limitations. This is an ideal match with the subject matter which after all is the emotional experience of members of a society and the role of these psychological factors in history. So while this is not an “experiential group” in the usual sense, Beisel makes use of his students’ emotional experiences with the subject matter to demonstrate the reality and utility of emotions and irrationality in the understanding of history. When this can be combined with challenging subject matter in the hands of a master teacher, you have the recipe for a

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most effective college learning experience.

I was involved in a research project led by Dick Mann on the college classroom which led to a book entitled, The College Classroom: Conflict, Change, and Learning. (New York: Wiley, 1970). We used the psychodynamically-derived scoring system from our previous small group research to analyze sessions of college classrooms taught by a variety of teachers. This is a book worth reading for those interested in a psychodynamic study of college teaching. What this study concluded was exactly what Beisel has demonstrated in his report: the emotional experiences of students and their effective handling by the teacher are just as important elements in the effectiveness of the class as the content. Among the many interesting findings of the study was a typology of six teacher identities, a description of the teacher’s relationship with the class: The Teacher as Expert; The Teacher as Formal Authority; The Teacher as Socializing Agent; The Teacher as Class Facilitator; The Teacher as Ego Ideal; and The Teacher as Person. Students vary in the degree to which they may want their teacher to adopt one or another of these identities although many students may hope for and need elements of all of these at different points in a class. The master teacher is one who has incorporated and integrated enough of these diverse identities to be able to adapt to the variety of students’ needs at various points in the history of a course. Beisel is certainly one of these. We can all learn a great deal from his experience.

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