March 22, 2015 - 16:18
For this project, I would like to focus on a theme that we explored when reading Boler, which is emotional literacy. I would like to explore the intersection between the ideas of emotional literacy curricula, conflict-resolution education, and how the two can be both problematic and beneficial. I'm interested in the topic of conflict-resolution because of how much I feel like it was a part of my life in high school, and how in this class we were able to look at it through a lens of multicultural education. I feel like it is a broad topic right now and I would like to narrow it down, with regard to many smaller topics such as age, gender, and other factors (so any suggestions would be appreciated!) I think I would want this project to ultimately culminate in a research paper, but I also think that designing a curriculum for a conflict-resolution education classroom would be interesting.
Comments
emotional literacy and conflict resolution education
Submitted by jccohen on March 23, 2015 - 18:55 Permalink
hpenner,
This sounds like a fruitful direction for your inquiry project. Boler's chapter is fairly conceptual, but of course she also includes a number of examples of specific programs, and I'd say that overall her focus is more on emotional literacy, with conflict resolution as an off-shoot that provides some key examples. Also, her book, Feeling Power is from 1999, so her examples are somewhat dated, and Goleman's book, Emotional Literacy is also from that era. It might be interesting for you to investigate what's going on in those areas now, and I know that conflict resolution in particular is an area that educators have been working with... Perhaps you want to investigate this subject in some contemporary education journals, and use this to narrow your topic--? You might check Harvard Ed Review, for example, and maybe Theory into Practice, and get a sense of what's going on in this field now as a way to focus in on aspects you want to investigate further. Are you interested in a particular age group? And what kinds of 'conflict' do you want to investigate? For example, I know there's been work focusing on conflict between racial and ethnic groups on a global level, and there's also work about bullying and that kind of issue more locally. I'm not sure what the connection with your high school experience was and where that might take you in terms of direction...