Affective Learning

Once considered a side issue in research on education, the study of affect, feelings, and emotions in learning has become increasingly prevalent across multiple disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and [Page 19]methodologies. Learning, scholars have come to see, is an affective and/or emotional experience whether the context is out of school or in school. In nonschool settings, affect is often more evident and arguably more welcomed than in the sometimes constrained context of academic classrooms. In both settings, there is little doubt that affect and emotion play a role in how youth and students make meaning. Indeed, nothing has much meaning without emotion. It is inseparable from coming to know and learn and, therefore, important to examine as it is dynamically enacted among people, objects, places, culture, ...