Reuben Chavira
The Paw Print
The premise of the presentation was that social emotions are responsible for creating social movements. The presentation itself was essentially a strategy for leveraging prosocial change in an at-risk community. Poetry, Prosody and Passion were discussed as identifiable components of social bodies, significant in their similar functions of conveying social emotions. They all express one’s emotions, being emotive and communicative at once. Therefore, they can be utilized as mechanisms for influencing social change because they speak to the heart of human intuitions.
The overall message of the presentation was to reaffirm that as social beings, we ought to embrace the social nature of our emotions. This means expressing compassion and kindness, through acts of generativity and selflessness. It means opposing apathy and indifference.
Edmond Burke once said, “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Therefore, it is necessary that we maintain our social interconnectivity at the affective level, lest we desensitize ourselves to the human condition, rendering ourselves incapable of empathy.
Lev Vygotsky believed that we learned best from each other. He championed a sociocultural approach to human development where an individual learns best through enculturation. By guiding one’s participation in the learning process, Vygotsky felt new mental processes and skills could be acquired. In at-risk communities, the mental processes and skills that are most lacking are related to affective management and self-regulation. However, the presentation asserted that Poetry, Prosody and Passion can act as a remedy for the at-risk environment caused my poor emotional management.
In particular, the presentation heavily relied upon groundbreaking social neuroscientific research being conducted by USC Professor Mary-Helen Immordino-Yang. In We Feel, Therefore We Learn Professor Immordino-Yang states that the original purpose for which the brain evolved was to manage our physiology and to optimize survival. She goes on to say that as brains – and the minds they support – became increasingly complex, the problem became not only dealing with one ’s self, but in managing the social interactions and relationships. Therefore, environments that lack resources for managing these interactions and relationships invariably produce at-risk tendencies.
As a possible solution, the model of a poetry open mic was proposed as a method for implementing a prosocial culture of expression, one in which social emotions can be shared and integrated into the fabric of the at-risk social body.
The open mic essentially acts as what Vygotsky referred to as a Zone of Proximal Development. This is the area of development, or lack thereof, between what an individual can do unaided, and what an individual can do with guidance.
For instance, perhaps an individual truly lacks the past experiences through which interactions are learned and are incapable of connecting with others. The poetry open mic serves as a model for a social dynamic through which that individual can observe compassion and admiration, hugging and handshakes.
The open mic creates a culture of positive social emotions that lead to prosocial behaviors of collaboration and cooperation. This, as the presentation asserted, could be an innovative and effective mechanism for leveraging change within an at-risk community.
What’s Been Said…