Reinvent Yourself Course: Developing Social Competence through Emotionalized Learning Experiences

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The results indicated that each teaching method had a more or less similar effect on students’ social competence. Two major reasons for this could be derived from Knowles’s (1990) teaching and learning assumptions. First, students at the university level are more practical and as such are more concerned about the utility and relevance of the affective content to their personal and professional lives as compared to those studying at the secondary or higher secondary level. Hence, the study participants most likely viewed the emotionalized learning experiences as a process of developing increased competence for achieving their full potential in life, which possibly determined their orientation or route to learning. Second, the study participants were perhaps intrinsically motivated to learn, which sustained their interest in the affective content and gained their cooperation towards learning. Therefore, to students in each group, the teaching method deployed for imparting the affective course was probably not as important as the affective content. Results also revealed that each of the four dimensions of emotionalized learning experiences played its distinct part in contributing to students’ social competence relating to group climate, team cohesion and social skills in the control and experimental groups. This was most likely because Knowles’s (1990) adult teaching and learning assumptions were followed, as they are crucial for facilitating learning and making it interesting, relevant, practical, motivating and permanent. The emotionalized learning experiences probably enabled students to advance at their own pace and comfort level (assumption of self-directedness) as well as helped them tap into their experiences to serve as a foundation for absorbing the new knowledge, skills and attitudes imparted by the course (assumption of previous experience).

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