Promoting emotional literacy: its implications for school and classroom practice

The text of Adrian's presentation at the SEBDA (Social Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties association) International Conference "Communication, Emotion and Behaviour" at University of Leicester, 12-14th September. Due to become a book chapter with other presentations from that conference.



Emotional literacy is a candy-floss concept. It looks and tastes very sweet, occupies a lot of space but without much real substance, is the product of a lot of hot air -- and yet it is also a symbol for happy, sometimes nostalgic, childhood and holiday times. Despite that, I am proudly part of a Southampton LEA, which was the first, and may still be, the only LEA in the U.K. to have emotional literacy as one of its top three educational priorities, consciously linked to issues of inclusion and equal opportunity.

It is perhaps important to stress at the outset that emotional literacy is not a "new" concept, though its formulation may be expressed in new language. We describe it in terms of skills and competencies, which are underpinned by a set of ethical and moral values. An emotionally literate person is one who can

· Recognise one’s own emotions and the emotions of others,
· Understand one’s own and others’ emotions
· Handle one’s emotions to develop and maintain wholesome relationships
· Appropriately express emotions.

Daniel Goleman, who popularised the concept of emotional intelligence, suggests five essential dimensions to emotional literacy: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. It is, as we will see, quite meaningful to describe not only individuals (pupils and teachers) as being more or less emotionally literate, but also classrooms, schools and LEAs.

Cutting through the floss to get to the candy, the significance of emotional literacy is that it reflects a concern that schooling has fundamentally lost its way. Traditionally, we have distinguished between the head (thinking), the heart (feelings) and behaviour (actions). It seems we have lost sight of that essential human wholeness in embracing a narrow view of what education (schooling) is all about, focusing exclusively on academic and behavioural aspects of human development. Schools, the major instrument of education, are measured, weighed and therefore valued almost wholly in terms of academic outputs: SATs, GCSEs, and A-levels. A poor second comes behaviour -- but the outcomes here are crude easily observed measures such as attendance and exclusions. There is some lip service in the present government to other issues, but until recently, little evidence of action. If this emphasis on academic and behavioural outcomes were simply being imposed upon an unwilling populace that would be bad enough -- the real problem, and possibly the cause of governmental lack of courage, is that these policies substantially reflect the view of the majority of "Middle England". It is of course absolutely correct that we should be concerned about "raising standards", but the real issue is which standards? The primary focus of schools is for teachers to teach and pupils to learn -- but teach what, learn what?

Emotional literacy is about recognising the crucial importance of that third "dimension" of human development -- the feeling or affective aspects of our being. There are cogent arguments to suggest that physically, psychologically, socially and economically it may be the most important dimension of all. To neglect it, to ignore it, to demean it as being pinky leftish "psychobabble" may be turning us into a herd of Gadarene swine heading for disaster.

For emotions are about survival. Physiologically, they relate to a very important part of our brains, (called the limbic system) which we share with our evolutionary ancestors: hence that part of our brain is sometimes called the "the Reptilian" brain. To survive, those organisms had to be able to sense danger or threat and deal with it. Fundamentally, a hardwired system led to three possible "automatic" responses when threat was sensed: to fight, to flee or to freeze (play dead). To survive, the species had also to reproduce, so similarly there were hardwired automatic responses to sensed opportunities for sexual activity.

We still have vestiges of these fundamentally important biological systems, except that now our brains have developed powers of reason, planning, problem solving, language etc using structures in the neocortex. Emotions are concerned about the here and now immediate responses: they push or pull us into action - into doing something now. Rationality, problem solving, is interested not just in the pulls and pushes of the now, but in the longer term consequences, weighing up pros and cons, considering alternatives and acting on the basis of the best bet. There is tension, but not contradiction between emotion and rationality – but, because emotion involves physiological arousal, it can easily hijack reason and takeover. The more physiologically aroused we are, the harder it is to be "rational", to take the longer term view. We have to learn to regulate our emotions, that is to rule them in the sense of using them to achieve our longer-term objectives. It can be argued that achieving this balance between reason and emotion is the task of the human being. If true, it becomes, therefore, an essential task of schooling and yet it does not seem to figure prominently alongside literacy and numeracy and all the other subjects that we teach in school. What is being advocated in the Southampton LEA’s focus on emotional literacy as a priority target is a new balance between thinking, feeling and behaviour. To achieve this balance a shift in the emphasis and understanding of the purposes of education is required.

There is a long tradition in human thinking and practice that what distinguishes us from the rest of nature is our drive to community. Maslow recognised that we share fundamental needs with lower organisms and higher primates -- the need for food, shelter, warmth, safety etc. and any threat to these will trigger "emotional" responses. But he went further to suggest that we have higher needs of belonging, self-esteem and self-actualisation. These are our specifically human needs and any threat to these has the same significance as a physical attack on us. We respond with similar physiological and psychological "survival" mechanisms -- physiological arousal preparing us for violent action accompanied by subjective feelings of anxiety (flight), and anger (fight) and depression (playing dead). The need to belong -- longing to be -- is essentially bound up with our individual and collective survival.

This need to feel that we play a significant part in our immediate and wider human environment can be summed up in the need for community. Community is an interesting word. It derives from the Latin, com meaning with and unit meaning one. Community is therefore essentially about becoming one with. It is the ethical, moral and philosophical basis of inclusion where each individual is recognised to have a dignity and value not dependent on what the individual does, achieves, looks like, believes, but simply because he or she exists as a human being. We seriously question, for example, whether the current emphasis on academic standards in a competitive ethos of examination results and league tables is not giving an anti-inclusive message to young people that worth and value depends on what a person can do, on the standards that they achieve. That seems to be the antithesis of community and fundamentally violates a principle of inclusion, namely that human worth does not depend on what we do but on the fact that we are!

Becoming one with other people involves a giving and receiving -- a sharing -- on a basis of a fundamental equality of value and worth. Community can only be achieved by "communication". It is the development of language, the only way we establish and maintain communication, is what appears to be specifically human. Communication is, itself, essentially a sharing, a two-way process of dialogue, conversation (turning towards each other), a speaking and a listening. It is, like a sense of belonging itself, something we first of all receive: we enter the human community not by first learning to speak but by being listened to. It is our parents who communicate our fundamental value, worth and dignity to us by listening intently to what we as newborn infants are trying to communicate, what our needs are. Being listened to is how we psychologically develop that sense of value and it is the only valid passport to the human community. It is something given to us, and not earned. Not being listened to is the most fundamental attack and threat to our psychological survival. It triggers all the emotional consequences of anger, of anxiety or depression. Not being listened to by our parents or significant others, including teachers, is emotional abuse; that is, where people are used as though they were things. Not listening to people is to demean them: to deny them meaning, significance or belonging.

If the longing for community, for belonging, is our basic human need, it is also our basic human task. If education is about helping people to develop all aspects of their humanity, (their potential), it would appear that teaching young people the values, skills, and competences for establishing and maintaining community must be at the very heart of what schools are about. We all personally have to learn how to maintain, preserve and enhance our own sense of unique value, worth, lovableness and, at the same time, maintain, preserve and enhance the dignity and worth of other people. This is no easy task but it is crucial to our individual survival and the survival of our species.

Emotional literacy focuses precisely on these issues. It deals with those values, skills, and competences which are essential to maintain my own and other’s sense of belonging, dignity and value and our place in the human community. Emotional literacy is not therefore an optional extra, tagged on to an already overcrowded curriculum. All the rest of the curriculum, our literacy and numeracy, our science and technology, our geography and history only have significance as a means of promoting my own access to the human community and as tools for advancing its welfare. Knowledge, science and technology can be used to promote or destroy human community. Which of these rather important consequences they lead to will depend crucially on how emotionally literate we are and our children become.

Emotional literacy in the Southampton LEA had its origins in its commitment to inclusion. The reduction of exclusions, and particularly permanent exclusions, became the first, pragmatic task to operationalise this commitment. In four years, schools reduced the number of permanent exclusions from 123 to 21. It is to the credit of the Southampton Psychology Service - then led by Peter Sharp - that the "bad" behaviour which is the trigger for exclusions was construed as primarily emotional (angry) in origin. One of the main interventions to reduce exclusions was to focus on those pupils at risk by offering small anger management groups, (typically for six to eight pupils over six to eight weeks) delivered by the psychology service alongside teachers. Well over 100 of such groups together with social skills and self-esteem variations have been running with direct educational psychologist involvement and using cascade principles, now increasingly being run by teachers and emotional literary support assistants (ELSAs).

Anger management groups for pupils at risk was a pragmatic response to a symbolic antithesis of inclusion, namely permanent exclusions. Before any such groups were run in the school, a precondition was that there should be at least a twilight session, and more usually a half day INSET for all the staff, both teaching and non-teaching. This was an attempt to ensure that the problem of angry pupils was not construed as being their problem alone.

When people do not belong, or feel as though they do not belong, they behave badly. A basic tenet of emotional literacy is that if poor behaviour is as an attempt by the individual or groups who are behaving badly that they are fundamentally trying to meet legitimate needs. Such needs are, for example, the need for attention, for stimulation and variety, for resources, for choice etc. The ends, or functions, of most bad behaviour are usually good: it is the strategies, the methods used to try to achieve these ends that are usually bad. This is primarily because alternative prosocial ways are not psychologically available to the person due to lack of understanding or of relevant skills. This is a very non-judgmental stance in the face of serious behaviour problems and leads to a teaching response rather than punitive attempt to control deviant behaviour. (Incidentally, a great threat to a sense of belonging are judgemental condemnations of the person rather than behaviour). Such behaviours are now seen as attempts to fulfil legitimate needs. Only when a person has a choice of alternative responses do we have a chance of developing “responsibility”. Responsibility only exists when there is a choice of more than one behaviour available. Such choices are made available by teaching and not by punishing, (or rewarding for that matter).

However, even given all the above, there is a strong tendency in the face of bad behaviour to pathologise the individual. Such pathologising again is the antithesis of genuine inclusion. We have seen this happening in a number of circumstances, including for example bullying where,consciously or unconsciously, we blame the victim and subtly give the message to the bullied child that it is he or she who needs to change by being less provocative, more assertive etc.

An allegory, which I am entitling “Lessons from Southampton” reminds us that, by focusing on the responsibility of individual pupils and their lack of skills and competencies, we may be missing the point.

The loss of the Titanic was to Southampton what the destruction of the Twin Towers has been to New York. That is not an exaggeration. It is said that there was not a street in Southampton nor a family that did not have a relative who went down with the Titanic. The ship sailed from Southampton as its home port. A number of the officers lived in Southampton, as did nearly all the engineers and the stewards and cleaners etc. When the Titanic struck the iceberg at 11.40 on Sunday evening on April 15 there were 2208 passengers and crew on board. Only 711, less than a third, survived and nearly 1500 people were lost. But this was an accident -- in an accident one might think that people had an equal chance of surviving. But that simply was not the case

Women and children had much higher rates of survival (74 and 52 percent respectively) than men (only 20 percent). Even though an unforeseen accident, these figures reflect human decisions and the commitment on the part of men that women and children should be treated preferentially. I'm afraid that that is where the good news ends. When we look at social class, nearly 63 % of first-class passengers survived, 41 % of second-class and only 25% of the third class. As with practically everything else we can measure (longevity, rates of health, housing educational outcomes,) those who have (in terms of wealth and access to resources) do better than those who have less. The Titanic disaster was no different. The news gets even worse when we look at who amongst the crew survived. Two out of every three of the deck crew survived. These were the officer class. Compare that with the 22 % of the engineers, which is understandable in view of the location of their job, and with the group which suffered most grievously, and included by far the largest number of people (nearly 500) who belonged to what were known as the Victualling Department -- the unskilled stewards, waiters and cleaners (most of them coming locally from Southampton). Less than 20 percent (1 in 5) of these survived. There are clearly human factors at work in the grossly unequal chances of survival based upon class differences. It is quite clear that the Titanic was clearly not a very inclusive society!

What might have made a difference in the distribution of who survived from the point of view of equal opportunities?

Whether a person could swim or not, (a personal skill or personal deficit), might in the individual case have made a difference. To be in the water for longer than for a few minutes meant disaster, but if you happened to be able to swim, you might have the chance of getting yourself onto a piece of floating wreckage. If you couldn't swim even that option was not open to you. So in terms of who survived and who didn't and in terms of how many survived the personal skill of being able to swim was very marginal.

In such a disaster as this, one of the very important factors is the ability to keep your head, not to rush around aimlessly, to know where you are going and how to get there. There is evidence that emotionally well-adjusted people are less easily hijacked by panic and fear. To have this rather wider personal skill of being able to problem solve under stress is almost certainly more significant than being able to swim in favouring a person’s chance of survival - and had there been not so many people panicking and rushing around, the number of people who survived might well have been greater. However, absolutely speaking, remaining calm in a panic would not have been of major significance.

It is known that there were problems with the lifeboats; however, even if all these had been in good working order, the lifeboats would still not have been adequate to get all the people off the ship. In reality, there simply would not have been time even with perfect organisation and no panic for this to be achieved. Nevertheless it is true that more available working lifeboats would certainly have made a significant difference to the numbers of survivors.

What would have made a huge impact, both to the absolute numbers of survivors and to a more equal distribution in terms of social class, would have been had the ship been designed differently in the first place. We are not talking about design in terms of seaworthiness but in terms of its "social" design. It is instructive to see photographs of the first-class accommodation: huge amounts of space on the upper decks, the safest part of the ship, laid out in fabulous luxury, occupied by only 325 people, less than 15 percent of the total ship population. Had the third class passengers’, stewards', waiters' and servants' accommodation been on the upper decks, far, far more people would have been saved.

What then are the Lessons From Southampton involving the loss of the Titanic? And what are its implications for emotional literacy?

First of all, that belongingness, (and remember that bad behaviour is related to a lack of a sense of belonging) is a matter of systemic issues rather than one of personal skills and competencies. The social redesign of the ship was probably the most important cause of how many survived and who survived. That is not to say that personal skills and competencies are irrelevant, but simply that government, schools and teachers often fail to see the wood for the trees. They focus, as we did initially in Southampton, on trying to help pupils behave better by teaching them anger management and social skills etc. Such initiatives are not a waste of time, and certainly not for some individual pupils, (as was the ability to swim and not to panic was for some individuals on the Titanic), but that the effects of allocating even very large resources at this level is likely to be marginal and, in the total picture, hardly measurable. However, there are likely to be other effects of working with individual children which may also be important; for example, the expression of support and encouragement given to teachers who have to work with sometimes very challenging pupils.

The second lesson from Southampton is that human systems are inevitably designed by people who have power and resources: people who belong. Emotional literacy is not primarily something for the have-nots but for the haves. There is an analogy here with what has been learned in the prevention and reduction of bullying. The most effective way of reducing bullying is not to work with the bullies, nor indeed with the victims, but with the bystanders. It is changing the “apathy” of the bystanders that has the greatest impact on rates of bullying and who gets bullied. It is, then, the 60 % of the population, (the haves), who need to change and to see that actually it is in their own best long-term, (more rational), interests to prevent the bad behaviour of those who do not feel as though they belong by genuinely sharing in the context of the whole community. “Middle England” needs to learn to be more emotionally literate and that involves not grasping for and protecting inflated lifestyles at the expense of others. Professor Sir Michael Rutter has shown that it is relative poverty that is crucial in the development of "not belonging" and low self-worth. We ask these questions: why do we have the highest percentage of males in Western Europe in prisons? why do we likewise have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe? what is the relationship between these facts and that we have the highest percentage of children living in poverty, (3.8 million at the last count) and the highest number of households in Western Europe where no member of that household is in gainful employment? Despite the rhetoric, the reality is that the gap between those who have and those who have not becomes progressively wider.

The third Lesson From Southampton is that when we establish and maintain community, everybody tends to benefit. Not only would the social class distribution of survivors have been far fairer had the ship been designed differently, but there would probably have been far more survivors in total.

And the last lesson comes not from Southampton but from Martin Luther King, who had a dream. The design and building of the Twin Towers were the work of people who had done extremely well at school, and achieved very high examination marks and professional qualifications. So were the jumbo jets that crashed into them. Academic, technological and scientific achievements crash to "ground zero" when, for whatever reason, people do not feel as though they belong. "We have learned how to fly to the moon, but we still have not learned how to walk hand-in-hand as brothers and sisters".

Emotional literacy is fundamentally about a dream, a vision -- and old men and women need to dream dreams, and young men and women need to see visions.

© 2003 Adrian Faupel

Added autumn 2003