Placing students’emotions at the heart of the learning process, a challenge for teachers
Placing students’emotions at the heart of the learning process, a challenge for teachers

Summary/Abstract: School is the place where emotions can constitute an obstacle to learning or facilitate it. Feelings of insecurity and even fear are often the cause of failure. It is then a question of trying to control parasite emotions in order to promote a meaningful and more serene learning. This article focuses on students’emotions as processes which, given their cerebral implementations in relation to the systems involved in motivation, attention and memory are at the heart of learning process. Researches suggest that emotional skills are beneficial to both well-being and academic performance. Emotions support attention, working memory, encoding, memory consolidation or processes related to executive control (inhibition). Those cognitive processes are also necessary for academic learning. Emotions therefore accompany the students within the classroom, and may interfere with learning or consolidate it. Research on emotions, their cerebral bases and functions, invite us to question the idea according to which emotions hinder school learning; on the contrary, even if emotions can indeed sometimes affect learning, experimental results suggest that they often facilitate cognitive processes such as attention and memory, which are essential for learning. Moreover, the fact that emotions have an important role in the process of learning suggests that it is important for the student to be able to know, control and use them, in an academic context.

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