What are topic emotions? A comparison of children's emotional responses to climate change, climate change learning and climate change picturebooks

Abstract

Pekrun and his colleagues highlight the significance and diversity of emotion in education. Their analysis suggests that these emotions can be categorised by their stimuli into those related to the classroom: activities, outcomes, relationships, topics and knowledge processes (epistemic). Most research in this area has focused on achievement emotions, with relatively limited research exploring topic emotions. This paper develops a framework for conceptualising topic emotions. It reports on a design‐based study that captured children's expressions of emotion in response to a climate change education programme using picturebooks. The data brought together emotional responses to climate change, to learning about climate change and to climate‐related picturebooks. Qualitative analysis of these responses highlights how they differ not only with regard to the emotions expressed, but also the structure of the emotional experience. Emotional responses to the broad topic of climate change were expressed as ongoing analytical judgements, where those related to learning about climate change were immersive and finite. Reading climate‐related picturebooks involved exploring how emotion is communicated and evoked. This supported quasi‐emotional experiences, where the reader imagines the emotions of the characters. The picturebooks are also shown to create vicarious emotional experiences, involving ethical‐based responses to the behaviour and circumstances depicted. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes a framework for disaggregating these differing emotional experiences related to topic.