부산대학교 도서관

Though uncomfortable emotion in the classroom has become politically controversial, scholarship has established its importance. In transformational learning in particular, scholars have theorized that far from being an undesirable side effect, student emotion is inherent in shifting beliefs and motivating action. In the "pedagogy of discomfort" central to critical service learning, such a shift in beliefs and action is the goal, but little quantitative work explores the complexities of emotion in this process. This paper describes a longitudinal study of a justice-oriented service-learning class that focused on the system-level causes of poverty. Results underscore the importance of uncomfortable emotion in this context and reveal nuance. Students who took the course experienced increased guilt, anger, and overwhelm when thinking about the social problem of poverty, but students' gender, race, and financial stress predicted variance in these emotions at baseline and the semester's end. Students who experienced more financial stress in their families of origin reported more anger at the end of the course while those with privileged racial or gendered identities reported less guilt than other students after completing the class. Emotion predicted the desired shifts in students' deficit versus system-oriented thinking: all three emotions were associated with less blame of individuals, but only anger and guilt were associated with system blame. At the multivariate level, anger emerged as the most influential predictor of decreased blame of individuals and of both community and political engagement a year after the course ended. Implications include the need to integrate emotion as a source of reflection and learning for students, both about their own positionality and their shifting perspectives on the world, the wisdom of exploring differences between guilt and shared responsibility, and the important role of anger in transformational learning and social change.