Learning to work with emotion through personal tutoring interactions
Monday, April 7, 2025 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
POSITIVE EMOTION
If you are a registered delegate, please login to view the full session information and resources
Session Outline
Emotions offer a valuable source of information (van Kleef & Cote, 2022) that enable students and personal tutors to understand whether they are achieving their goals (Barrett, 2017). In the context of higher education, these might include academic achievement goals, relational goals, identity goals and emotion regulation goals, which may interact and even conflict (Harley et al. 2019). Emotions are an important element of tutee-tutor professional relationships and interactions, with personal tutoring offering a space to explore emotion, and emotion as a source of information about the value and effectiveness of these social interactions.
Conversely, emotions can create barriers to effective personal tutoring interactions due to concerns about not knowing how to appropriately respond to their own or each other's expressed or perceived emotion (Mortiboys, 2011). Students and personal tutors have varying degrees of emotional awareness which includes recognising and making meaning of pleasant and unpleasant emotions (Ippolito & Kingsbury, 2024). They may not recognise the relevancy of their emotional awareness, or may lack emotional awareness that could helpfully be developed through the process of personal tutoring.
This workshop will combine the two facilitators' experiences of being a personal tutor, educational developer, psychologist and institutional mental health and wellbeing lead, with empirical research conducted with students and tutors in relation to connected emotional experiences. Based on this, we will explore how emotional awareness can be developed through personal tutoring processes. Specifically we will facilitate activities that allow participants to develop greater understanding of how to work with positive and uncomfortable emotions in personal tutoring, including approaches that can be used with their own students or personal tutor colleagues. These are based on activities we use in our university-wide personal tutoring development workshop. This will include critical consideration of the value of a variety of emotions in higher education, including promoting positive emotion (Fredrickson & Cohn, 2008) and reframing uncomfortable emotion (Brackett, 2019). We will model techniques for how to have conversations about this with students (Ippolito et al, 2020). Aspects such as what care, compassion and empathy looks like in achievement-orientated university teaching and learning contexts and implications for mental health and well-being will be considered (Barden & Caleb, 2019, Gilbert, 2015).
Learning Outcomes
1. Recognise emotion as a valuable source of information to work with during personal tutoring interactions.
2. Use approaches to facilitate conversations between students and personal tutors about the variety of emotions experienced through academic study and how to helpfully make meaning of these.
Bibliography
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made. The Secret Life of the Brain. Pan Macmillan.
Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to Feel, London, Quercus Editions Ltd.
Fredrickson, B.L. and Cohn M.A. (2008) Positive emotions, In M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland-Jones, and L.F. Barrett Handbook of Emotions (3rd Edition, p. 782). Guilford Press.
Gilbert, P. (2015). An evolutionary approach to emotion in mental health with a focus on affiliative emotions. Emotion Review, 7(3), 230-237.
Harley, J. M., Pekrun, R., Taxer, J. L., & Gross, J. J. (2019). Emotion Regulation in Achievement Situations: An Integrated Model. Educational Psychologist, 54(2), 106-126. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2019.1587297
Ippolito, K., Bale, R., Boyd, N., & Kingsbury, M. (2020). Emotions as pedagogical tools: The role for educational developers in university learning and beyond. ETH Learning and Teaching Journal, 2(2).
Ippolito, K., & Kingsbury, M. (2024). Reciprocal cognitive and emotional interaction in STEMM university learning and teaching. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 21660. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-72656-w
Mortiboys, A. (2011). Teaching with Emotional Intelligence: A step-by-step guide for Higher and Further Education professionals (2nd ed. ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203806463
Pekrun, R., & Perry, R. P. (2014). Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. In R. Pekrun & L. Linnenbrink-Garcia (Eds.), International Handbook of Emotions in Education (pp. 120-141). Routledge.
van Kleef, G. A. (2009). How emotions regulate social life. The emotions as social information (EASI) model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(3), 127-188.
van Kleef, G. A., & Cote, S. (2022). The Social Effects of Emotions. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, 629-658. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-010855
Competencies
This session addresses the following competencies of the UKAT Professional Framework for Advising and Tutoring