| Of all the mental activities that contribute to human understanding, emotion is the most pervasive, and yet, it is often seen as indeterminate and untrustworthy information. Predominantly western views of reality, organized around logocentric concepts; promote the underlying assumption that knowledge can only be realized and advanced through logical processes. Because of this western ideology, emotion has only recently been recognized as making a viable contribution to pedagogy. Recent research in psychology bears out the conclusion that emotion makes a significant contribution to critical thinking. Subjugating it to insignificant status in logocentric epistemologies only prevents us from utilizing the powerful contribution emotion can make in acquiring, interpreting and expressing knowledge. A review of the educational philosophies of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and others shows us that educational philosophy supports the inclusion of emotion as an intrinsic part of learning. This study recognizes the need for reading and writing pedagogies to utilize current psychological theories of language and learning that involve the affective domain. The clinical research was conducted in a classroom setting superimposing a musical soundtrack over a reading passage that was scrolled at a controlled rate. The hypothesis is that the music will provide additional emotional information to the top-down process, helping fact retention and overall comprehension. This also allows the poor reader to bring all of her emotional experience to the text, giving the student a feeling of expertise in the middle of a frustrating task. It is suggested that this aspect of the exercise can be used to generate a series of prewriting papers in the composition classroom. |
