![]() However, participation and involvement in a lecture style setting will have the same effects: isolation will result in pain, involvement will result in a pleasure.Ī team is the best setting for learning through collaborative critical thinking and problem-solving. In a lecture-style setting this is more difficult of course. This a win for the participant and a win for the team. The more we participate the more our identity and values become aligned with the task. The more involved they are the more active they are. The participant joins in with the activities of an individual or group. Involvement instills a feeling of pleasure. Involvement means joining in as a full participant and being given a role. If we want to learn, or if we want our students to learn, involvement is the key. “ Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” - Ben Franklin quoting Aristotle. If I feel pleasure when I learn I will continue to learn. If I feel pain when I am trying to learn I will avoid it. It is obvious that in all endeavors in life the pleasure-pain principle is at work. Such an environment can have a negative impact on the self-esteem, academic achievement, career development, and income of targeted groups. Interactions with teachers, instructors, colleagues, and learning-peers which are cooperative, friendly, helpful, focused, and trusting are important contributors to achievement and personal performance.īy contrast, a substandard environment is bereft of mutual respect and compassion it may be characterized by differential treatment and devaluation of certain groups, including women and minorities. Those same experts know that in the absence of safety it is impossible to learn.Įxamining individual psychological safety further, it is obvious that being anxious or worried about physical safety, or being victimized by hostility, aggression, and harassment results in a feeling of personal loss, devaluation and lowered self-esteem making learning impossible.Ī positive, open, and supportive climate can enhance learning and academic excellence. ![]() ![]() Instruction, Training, Teaching, LearningĮducational psychologists have always known that one of the most pleasurable feelings is safety, or absence of fear. For example, my right to seek pleasure by dominating a group meeting stops with my obligation not to deprive others of their opportunity to be contributing team members and thereby causing them pain. However, it is accepted that there are limits on an individual’s pursuit of happiness or pleasure which are imposed by legal, ethical, familial and commonsense constraints. ![]() It also makes sense to seek pleasure since happiness or comfort is the normal state of human beings. It makes sense to avoid pain since pain impedes function. Extreme hedonism is self-destructive, as anyone who reads the news knows, because gratification becomes harder and harder to achieve. Similarly the stimulus of pleasure –or hedonism– is the idea that life can only be lived to the full when pleasure is the primary goal. This is normal, but can develop into an unhealthy preference in life towards pain-avoidance, which in extreme cases becomes the sole and self-destructive purpose of life. So we all spend a great deal of time and effort avoiding pain. Pain stimuli and its consequences are more immediate than pleasure stimuli. It is important for instructors or teachers to understand that the normal state for which their students are constantly searching is one of happiness and contentment, and that their abnormal state is the product of pain, which they seek to avoid or minimize. We continue into adolescence and adulthood driven by these two forces. He noted that later on children develop a counter-force, the “ Ego”, which exerts some control over the appetites of the “ Id” so that we do not overindulge or exhibit unacceptable behavior. Freud took the matter further when he described the “ Id”, a powerful, animalistic force buried deep in our unconscious mind that seeks immediate gratification of all needs, wants, and urges, with resultant feelings of pleasure and pain-avoidance. we have known that nature has placed us under two masters: Pleasure and Pain.
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