Emotions at a distance

When Grenfell Tower caught fire on 14 June 2017, killing 72 people, the images and sounds in the news coverage felt visceral. I lived in a smaller block of flats in east London as a child; I remembered friends in the high-rise blocks and the beautiful views over the London skyline from the top-floor flats. So when I was asked to write case study materials on the fire for a new Open University criminology course, I set to work willingly.

The case study required students to think critically about how events become termed 'accidents' or 'tragedies' or 'disasters', instead of, for example, 'crimes' or 'negligence'. It helped them start to unpack some of the sociocultural and economic contexts of the fire; how race, gender, and poverty can render some groups of people invisible or voiceless, and how some of us become seen as political or social problems. This was useful material for our first-year criminology students, and I enjoyed designing learning activities I hoped would engage and challenge them. But as I worked with the interviews, videos, and academic literature on the fire, I recognised something else.

Somewhat to my surprise, I was finding the work emotionally hard. I was writing the activities that would sit alongside a video about Grenfell Tower on the course website, and I needed to watch the video again and again, the images of the burning tower, the interviews with survivors and with the families of victims. It was distressing, and I reached out to a colleague, took a break, and put it aside for another day. As I did, a question was worrying me; how might this affect our students? 

Open University undergraduates are distance learning students, and I imagined them engaging with this material in their homes, perhaps in flats similar to the ones that had burnt down. Would this material be distressing for them, too? How would we warn them it was part of the course content? How could we equip our students to engage with this material and acknowledge the emotions it might bring up?

I am an experienced educator, and, as an Associate Lecturer on criminology and other social science courses for the Open University since 2013, I am no stranger to teaching content that deals with trauma, death, or distressing events. But the skills needed to do this in distance learning were, in my experience, different to the skills I developed in the earlier part of my career in face-to-face educational settings. I, along with OU colleagues Dr Leigh Downes (Senior Lecturer in Criminology) and Anne Alvaer (Associate Lecturer), set out to research how our students were navigating this potentially distressing material, and what skills they were using to look after themselves as they did, with minimal face-to-face interactions with peers or tutors. 

Leigh brought their expertise in researching and teaching gender-based violence, and Anne and I were drawing on years of experience delivering distance learning in the social sciences. Too often, we decided, questions had either been asked about how students might not cope with emotive content; or assumptions had been made that they should cope, without much thought as to the skills they used to do so. What if we explored how they did cope with this distressing material, particularly at a distance? What emotional resilience skills did they bring to their learning, and how could we support and facilitate these?

The problem: Navigating emotions in distance learning

Distance learning – in all its iterations – has boomed in higher education since the coronavirus pandemic. This changing landscape requires innovative methods and strategies, leading to the rapid evolution of teaching and learning approaches. At the same time, there has been a conversation in higher education about the extent to which students should be exposed to 'difficult' content that could be experienced as triggering or distressing.

Laying aside some of the hyperbolic press coverage of content warnings and censorship as part of the 'culture wars', the concerns of educators generally lie in one of two directions. Some people worry about the impact of emotive content on students. When faced with a group of adult students, we simply do not know what their life experiences may be, what they may find distressing, their resilience to potentially emotive content, or indeed what they are expecting from the course. Some educators may not feel equipped to support students who become distressed or make disclosures about past traumas. We may also be unsure of our own emotional responses to certain topics or themes, which can mean we avoid introducing them to our students. This can lead educators to 'tone down' their material or avoid some topics altogether.

Alternatively, educators can worry they are 'wrapping students in cotton wool' if they remove potentially distressing content from their courses, arguing that in certain disciplines – such as psychology or criminology – students will need to be able to handle potentially distressing materials in their future careers. Emotional responses can be seen as problematic from this perspective, and we discovered they can even be seen as an indication that students are studying the 'wrong' subject.

Interestingly, this problematising emotional responses can extend to attitudes about educators themselves, with any emotional responses to the case studies or topics they are teaching potentially framed as unprofessional or indications they are not 'coping'. We model objectivity, analytical thinking, and a professional distance for our students, giving them a message that emotions have no place in 'serious' academic study; even when we are dealing with material that in other contexts would be deeply emotive and may be deeply personal.  

Of course, in face-to-face classroom settings, experienced educators have many strategies to take care of the emotional well being of students. Most of us can think of tutors or lecturers from our own pasts who took time over us; were approachable; made classrooms safe spaces to explore difficult thoughts, and were able to create learning communities that allowed for expression of struggle, distress, or the personal impact of the study material. However, distance and online learning raises particular questions about how to provide this support and navigate the teaching of potentially distressing content, and many face-to-face strategies used by educators need to be rethought in an online context.

There is also an issue that the support structures in place for students and their teachers can focus on 'mental health' in general terms, which can pathologise emotional responses to the course content itself. There can be an assumption that stress around assessment, workload, or pre-existing issues such as depression are the primary concerns, without enough acknowledgement that study material itself can evoke emotional reactions or even be the source of secondary trauma. The unintentional message can be that there is something 'wrong' if students or staff find the material emotionally challenging or distressing, instead of seeing emotional responses as a normal part of the learning process.

Interestingly, our work suggests potential emotive content is not the exclusive domain of disciplines such as health and social care, criminology, or psychology, where discussion of human suffering and injustice might be expected. We have heard accounts from colleagues in diverse disciplines such as engineering, law and environmental science that suggest that students and staff across higher education may benefit from exploring what it means to teach and study emotive topics well.

The solution: emotional resilience as a skill

Higher education students – and educators – come to learning with a wealth of experience in navigating life. However, too often we can fall into deficit thinking about our students, focusing on what they cannot do, rather than what they can.

In our research, our team wanted to explore whether and how content was experienced as emotive, and what students did to successfully navigate this. Therefore, we sought to start from a position of affirming what worked, and importantly, aimed to explore how we as educators could learn from our students' strategies, and facilitate the use and development of these skills for ourselves and future cohorts of students.

The final publications from our work are still in progress, but the initial findings have already informed my own teaching practice, and are being disseminated to our colleagues. Students told us very strongly that they expected – indeed wanted – to study challenging and difficult material. Some of the sections of the criminology module they were studying that we considered particularly emotive (such as the case study of Grenfell Tower fire, or material on domestic abuse) were indeed, distressing to some students. However, they often also experienced this content as empowering, motivating, engaging, and even anger-inducing, meaning they wanted to address some of the injustices and inequalities they read about in future careers or campaigning. This material also helped students make sense of their own lived experiences, and students were skilled at taking care of themselves as they worked through this material.

We also asked students about what helped them navigate emotional responses to learning materials. Interestingly, students – especially those with lived experiences of traumas such as gender-based violence or mental health difficulties – were often especially skilled at navigating the emotional impact of their studies, and generously shared with us a diverse range of practices that enabled them to continue learning.

Of particular interest was the students' feedback on how their tutors or lecturers could facilitate the learning of emotionally challenging material in an affirming, supportive way. Simply acknowledging the emotional impact of material was a useful starting point, and many educators already do this through two common strategies easy to use in online learning; content notes, and signposting to student mental health or wellbeing support services. Students reported that content notes allowed them to use their pre-existing emotional resilience skills to navigate material that might have otherwise been distressing.

Signposting to other sources of support was also seen as useful, but there can be a risk that this could imply that emotional reactions are seen as problematic or pathologised, and are not welcome in the learning environment. This suggests that it would be beneficial to embed conversations about the emotional impacts of learning content throughout our course design and teaching practice. Higher education teachers are often already very experienced at building skills such as essay writing, data collection and handling, and team working.

Therefore, framing emotional resilience as part of the toolkit of skills students will need to do well on their undergraduate degrees across a wide range of disciplines allows for open discussion between educators and their students, and de-pathologises emotional responses to material covered in the course. Of particular note was that for many students, engaging with emotive material in a distance learning context actually allowed them to utilise a wider range of emotional resilience skills than a face-to-face context.

The impact: supporting students and educators

When we think about the impact of research, we tend to focus on publications, or changes in practice, and maybe think less about the impact on us as individuals. The research we started with our criminology students on their emotional resilience skills has been a project that has resulted in some interesting paths forward for future work, but has also influenced my own focus.

In terms of the impact on practice, we have disseminated our findings within the Open University, and some of our material is being used to inform the framing of emotive content on new modules – including, for example, the OU's recent MSc in Psychology (Conversion). As a team we are planning to publish our full research findings soon, but in the meantime I and OU colleagues have been actively embedding work on emotional resilience into our teaching.

We also used our research as the basis of a piece of work as part of the Positive Digital Practices project (funded by the Office for Students). For this, Dr Leigh Downes and I developed an Educator Guide to teaching emotional resilience skills in higher education. This is supported by session materials for teaching emotional resilience skills, and a student-facing guide which can be used or adapted to encourage distance learning students to reflect on and develop their own emotional resilience skills as they navigate difficult material in their studies. We also co-produced a series of short videos with educators, researchers and students on navigating the emotional impact of their teaching and learning, and all these materials are available at the above link.

On a personal level, the work I have done on this project sparked an interest in emotional resilience and learning that led to a more reflective teaching practice in my 'day job', and a curiosity about the role of emotions in higher education. It also encouraged me to explore emotional wellbeing skills in more depth, and nudged me to take action on a long standing interest and study a MSc Psychology. I am now planning to explore how individuals use emotional resilience skills in contexts outside the classroom in my MSc dissertation.

Ruth Wall is Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Open University, and a Student Member of the British Psychological Society. [email protected].