The Fabric of Vision: For an Emotionally Rich (Language) Learning

The closing sequence of 1959 François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups is a masterpiece in its own right, where the elation of freedom, the pleasure of discovery, the awe of future and possibility all close up in the face and gaze of young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud). The whole film should be considered a fundamental manual by all teachers and teacher educators. A completely different picture is seen in the hallucinated despair in the eyes of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) undergoing operant conditioning in A Clockwork Orange, the 1971 dystopian film by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony A Clockwork Orange 1962 novel by the same title. These two extreme opposites can effectively represent an amplified dichotomy in the diverging possible approaches to the use of educational technologies, nonetheless of digital technologies. The so-called digital revolution is very probably a real revolution, but its scope and relevance risk a deep misunderstanding, especially in the field of education, if one forgets the main actor in play: the human factor. And since we are «all spirits, and / Are melted into air, into thin air: / […] / […] We are such stuff / As dreams are made on» (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1), «the baseless fabric of this vision» should be strongly kept into account. Evidence resulting from neuroimaging research and developments of the discovery of mirror neurons (and consequent hypotheses about the evolutionary path to the development of verbal language) show ’hard science’ support to the beliefs gathered through praxis by teachers and students on the focal role of emotions in (language) learning. Beard et al. (2007: 235) state that «we need richer conceptions of students as affective and embodied selves and a clearer theorisation of the role of emotion in educational encounters. These areas are currently under-researched and under-theorised in higher education», a statement that remains true a decade later. Language teachers have immense reservoirs of emotionally gurgling fresh waters in arts and literatures to quench the affective thirst of their students, and the digital technologies make such resources easier to access and to appropriate. Some examples to illustrate such perspective are drawn from those same reservoirs.