From awareness to action: emotional reflection as a pathway to social agency


Rohil Sharma, University of British Columbia; Oral Robinson, University of British Columbia

As higher education continues to blend theory and practice, fostering not only academic excellence but also social responsibility is an important curricular competency. Social responsibility emphasizes the ethical and moral obligations that individuals, organizations, and institutions have toward broader society. It is a reflective process that constitutes recognizing the impact of ones actions on the social fabric and actively contributing to the well-being of a community and its members. As a cornerstone of this process, emotional reflection emerges as a central tenet for students’ development of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Sociological literature regards emotions as socially constructed phenomena shaped by cultural norms and interactions (Averill, 1980; Harré, 1986; Hochschild, 1983; Lutz, 1988; Ratner, 1989). As individuals engage with their emotions, they are able to interpret their subjective experiences and contextualize these experiences in proximate social landscapes. However, the symbiotic relationship between emotional reflection and social agency is under-emphasized in existing research. As such, this presentation seeks to emphasize the transformative potential of emotional reflection in the classroom. Based on a survey (n=209) and qualitative analyses of memo forms deployed throughout three terms of an introductory sociology course, we examine how emotional reflection can serve as a pathway to empowering students’ social responsibility and fostering their social agency. Through pedagogical activities (such as prompted emotive writing, free-form journaling, and open dialogues between students) centered around students’ emotional resonance to topics in the course, we found emotional reflection to support students’ ability to recognize and interpret social injustices and understand their relationality to systems of oppression. On an individual level, this gave students a clarified understanding of their own values, ethical principles, and positionalities. Through articulating their emotions, students were able to channel their reflections into actionable steps to combat injustices and challenge systems of oppression. Upon sharing these reflections with their peers, students were able to empathize with a diversity of perspectives, foster a deeper understanding of how the same social contexts enact disparities between groups, and develop solidarity by observing the social axes and experiences that they had in common. We observe how this emotional exchange between students functioned as a constructive dialogue centering their ways of knowing, which strengthened their morale for enacting social change. This presentation points to the need for more emotional dialogue in higher education and emphasizes its integral role in nurturing the social agency of students. By encouraging students to center their emotions in their learning, educators can cultivate a more holistic and inclusive learning environment that serves as an incubator for socially conscious decision-making and community engagement. We suggest that educators provide varied and overt opportunities for students to articulate and share their emotional experiences in relation to course content; this would help instill a practical and humanistic understanding of social issues that transcends the potentially abstract nature of theory-based learning. More broadly, we call for a paradigm shift in educational philosophy that acknowledges an inextricability between emotional reflection and social agency. By appealing to the emotional intelligence and self-awareness of students, educators can help shape individuals into effective social actors in the contemporary world. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: