Matters of the Heart: Exploring the emotional dimensions of educational experience in recollected accounts of excellent teaching.

This paper explores the predominance and importance of emotions in teaching in higher educational settings through a qualitative analysis of a total of 139 brief statements provided by a cohort of past students at the University of Limerick in Ireland when asked to nominate a single faculty member for a teaching award, and to provide reasons for their nomination. We argue that the analysis of this kind of data can be used to explicate more clearly the concepts that learners associate with positive learning experiences. More particularly we also note that students often refer to emotions, emotional states, and emotionally satisfying experiences when providing descriptions of excellent teaching and generally seem to associate their own and their teachers' positive emotional states with good teaching and good learning. Our discussion encourages future research into the nature and repertoire of emotions in higher education settings, particularly from the points of view of past students. We also make recommendations about how academic developers can use this and similar kinds of data in efforts to enhance and develop academic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]