Emotion Is Learning

A teacher friend of mine can tell you almost nothing about what she learned in grade 5. She had a teacher that year who was, in her words, mean. Not once in a while mean. A daily condition. She passed the grade. She has the report card somewhere to prove it. But ask her what she learned that year and she goes quiet. It isn’t there.

Ask her about grade 2 and the year unspools in detail. The teacher, the classroom, the projects, the specific way certain concepts were explained to her at seven years old. She remembers being cared for. She remembers almost everything she learned.

Same brain. Same district, probably the same building. One year of content is gone. One year is intact two and a half decades later. The difference wasn’t her intelligence or her effort. It was whether the adult in the room made her feel safe enough to think.

This week I talked with Adelee Penner about a book I had just finished reading, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made.” Adelee had read it years before me and had been sitting with its implications for education a lot longer than I had. Neither of us walked away from that conversation satisfied. Between the two of us, over a half a century in this profession, and we agreed we haven’t done nearly enough to educate our own teachers about what emotion actually does to learning. That conversation is the reason I went looking for the research that follows.

For a long time, education treated this as a nice-to-have. Warmth was a bonus on top of instruction, not part of it. The neuroscience says otherwise, and it says it bluntly. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who has spent her career studying the brain’s relationship to learning, put it this way: it is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thought, or make meaningful decisions without emotion. Not difficult. Impossible. The brain evolved to conserve its considerable energy costs for things that matter to the organism, and “mattering” is an emotional judgment before it is a cognitive one. We only think deeply about what we care about.

This overturned an older assumption in neuroscience, the one that treated emotion as static on a circuit that reason had to fight through. Antonio Damasio’s work with patients who had damage to the brain’s emotion-processing regions showed the opposite. Their logic stayed intact. Their ability to function in the world collapsed. Rational decision-making, it turns out, requires an emotional rudder to steer it. When you strip the emotion out, you don’t get pure reason; you’re left with paralysis.

Now run that framework backward through my friend’s two teachers and the outcome isn’t surprising anymore. It’s predictable. Fear-based learning gets encoded around threat and escape. It’s shallow by design, because the brain isn’t trying to build something durable, it’s trying to survive the hour. Curiosity-based learning, the kind a caring teacher makes possible, gets encoded as something worth keeping. One year taught her to get through class. The other taught her something about the world. Only one of those survives contact with time.

I think about this differently because of where my career has taken me. I’ve worked in Northern Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, and I served as Director of Education at Prince Albert Grand Council. I have sat with the legacy of residential schools long enough to know that what I’m describing isn’t an abstraction.

For 166 years, Indigenous children in this country were removed from their families and placed in institutions explicitly designed, in the words of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and assimilate a people out of existence. Children were told their language was evil and their culture was backward. Every condition Immordino-Yang identifies as necessary for deep learning, safety, being valued by the adult in the room, the freedom to be curious rather than defensive, was not simply missing from residential schools. It was inverted on purpose.

If we filter the neuroscience through that, the results are not a mystery. A nervous system locked permanently into threat detection doesn’t get to choose curiosity. It gets fear of failure and an instinct to avoid anything that feels too much like school, patterns documented again and again in the survivors themselves. What got transmitted in those buildings as learning, when anything did, was shallow, compliance-driven, and built to be forgotten as fast as possible, because forgetting was the safer option. Although, the memories of the abuse were not to be forgotten.

It didn’t stop with the generation that walked through those doors. Children of survivors carry elevated adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores without ever setting foot in an institution, because trauma doesn’t require direct exposure to pass itself forward. A parent whose own capacity for warmth was stripped out of them at age six has less of it left to offer their own child twenty years later. The caring that Immordino-Yang’s research identifies as the precondition for deep learning was rationed out over generations before some of these children ever opened a textbook.

None of that requires an institution as extreme as a residential school to operate. A child going home to violence or instability carries the same threat-primed nervous system into a classroom that may be perfectly kind. The room doesn’t have to be hostile. The child’s wiring already is. What looks like an attention problem, or a motivation problem, or a discipline problem is very often a nervous system that never got the memo that this room is safe. Educators unfamiliar with trauma tend to read the behaviour and miss the mechanism.

I’d be lying if I said this framework stayed comfortably in the past or in someone else’s home life. Last fall our teachers went through a strike. It was emotionally draining. Many of us felt degraded and disrespected, and we said so, plainly, to each other. I don’t think that experience stayed contained to staff rooms and bargaining updates.

Teachers’ emotions are not private information they keep to themselves once the bell rings. Research on emotional contagion in classrooms is consistent on this point: what a teacher feels, students perceive, and it becomes linked to their own motivation and emotional state, whether anyone names it aloud or not. Burnout and exhaustion travel the same route, degrading the consistency, warmth, and organization that Immordino-Yang’s model identifies as the conditions for deep encoding. Achievement drops. Student motivation shifts from wanting to learn toward simply complying, which is the exact fear-based mode that produces the forgettable version of school.

I want to be careful here, because this is not an indictment of teachers who were exhausted and hurting. It’s the same mechanism running through the other end of the relationship. My friend’s grade 5 teacher chose to be unkind. Our staff last fall didn’t choose exhaustion, it was done to them, and their capacity to offer students the emotional safety this whole framework depends on was depleted at the source. A tired, demoralized adult cannot fully hand a child the sense of safety that deep learning requires, not because they’ve stopped caring, but because the resource that caring draws on was drained before the first bell of the day.

If there’s a single thread through all of this, from one seven-year-old’s kind teacher to a residential school dormitory to a staff room after a bruising strike, it’s that emotion was never separate from learning. It was the mechanism the whole time. We built school systems as though content delivery and emotional experience were two different jobs, one for the curriculum and one for whoever had spare time for it. The brain never agreed to that division. It only ever learned deeply through one door, and that door was always caring.

Vince Hill is a teacher and principal in rural Alberta. He writes weekly on life, politics, and education.