Proceedings of The 3rd International Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education
Year: 2021
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/3rd.ictle.2021.02.111
Cultivation of Emotions through Textbooks: Example of Croatian Gymnasium History Textbooks
Rona Bušljeta Kardum , Katarina Dadić and Martina Horvat
ABSTRACT:
Contemporary teaching focuses on the students’ active role in the acquisition of knowledge. Specifically, it concentrates on the cognitive aspect of knowledge and neglects the role of emotions, whose role and significance in the learning process should be recognized as extremely viable not only for the learning process but also for the students’ personal development and their interaction with peers. In this paper, the authors perceive empathy as the acceptance, understanding, and appreciation of emotions, opinions, and social position of others while highlighting its significance in the students’ learning process and their interaction with peers. Since textbooks are the primary medium via which the transfer of knowledge occurs, in the second part of the paper we analyzed the content of high school history textbooks. The results suggest that high school history textbooks overemphasize the cognitive aspect of the learning process while simultaneously inadequately put students in a position which would also allow them to be more emotionally engaged with the historical events.
Keywords: cognition; emotional intelligence; empathy; learning process; teaching.