Dramatic and undramatic emotional energy: Creating aesthetic and emotive learning experiences in science classrooms

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how everyday mundane actions in science classrooms may be understood as everyday dramatic performances that are most often taken-for-granted and imbued with emotive experiences. To describe these experiences a novel sociological concept of emotional energy (EE) is adopted. EE is an individual and collective experience of togetherness, social cohesion or solidarity arising through embodied performances of situated social practices. It is a way for making visible, cognitive performances and emotive experiences by observing self-coordinating actions, bodily and conversational alignment, mutual bodily entrainment around physical objects, gravitation toward shared ideas, and the fluency of these interactions. In this chapter I make reference to a series of previous studies to describe emotional energy and the notion of everyday dramatic performances. I then describe strategies for educating preservice science teachers about emotional energy as an experience that may be generated and observed in science classrooms through planning and explicit teacher actions. Such awareness by science teachers is important for understanding the influence of emotional engagement in, and dramatic performances of, science learning.