Abstract
Organizational scholars and neuroscientists suggest that when people are more emotionally engaged, they learn more effectively. Clinical art therapists suggest that the experience as well as the expression of emotions can be enabled or constrained by different materials. So then, what materials can be employed by management educators to achieve optimal levels of emotional engagement? In this essay, we begin to answer this question by discussing the ubiquitous material aspects of management learning by exploring the complex relationships involving materials, emotions, and learning, and by presenting a set of practical ideas about how management educators can become more adept at designing and facilitating learning processes that effectively engage students’ emotions through the use of materials such as clay, LEGO bricks, and paper.
In a Leadership Development program at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, two groups engaged in almost identical learning processes. First, they sculpted their individual visions of sustainable leadership, and then they combined their creations into a group sculpture of sustainable leadership. The only difference between the two groups was that one group used LEGO pieces and the other used clay. An observer noticed the group using clay experienced a lot more explicit conflict among participants. It’s no surprise, the facilitator said, it’s always that way with clay.
In what ways do materials matter in learning processes? How and why would anyone choose a particular material when designing a learning process? Why might working with clay produce more conflict than working with LEGO bricks?
At a practical level, people engaged in management learning, including classroom teachers as well as trainers and organizational development process facilitators, frequently use experiential techniques. Educators employ pedagogical methods that involve more than just talking in order to encourage people to participate actively in the learning process. Sometimes, these techniques include theatrically based techniques, such as dramatic role-play; sometimes these techniques involve the use of various digital media, including technologies, such as web and video; sometimes these techniques involve the use of materials that are commonly associated with artistic practices, such as painting, collage, and drawing; and sometimes these techniques involve the use of materials that are commonly associated with child’s play, such as LEGO bricks or sand. Management educators routinely make decisions about media, materials, and the materiality of their teaching environment. But what theory of pedagogy informs these decisions? We may know from experience that a certain technique works, but do we really know why or how it works?
Learning is a complex process, and designing learning processes—especially experiential ones—requires considering a wide range of interconnected variables. One of these variables is the material to be used, another is how to use them, another is when to use them, and so on. Our own tendency, prior to the experience in Banff described above, was to select materials based largely on practicality. We have our students use old newspapers to build paper towers because the person who taught us the exercise used old newspapers. We have our students draw with crayons because boxes of crayons are cheap and we have a pet theory (based on no research of any sort) that crayons were less intimidating than water colors or oil paints because they required less specialized skill. They were also less messy and hopefully the facilities staff would not complain to the dean that we had messed up another classroom. Yet although certainly practicality, expense, safety, student comfort, and not losing one’s job are all important factors for designing experiential learning processes, we see a need for a more theoretically based understanding of how materials can affect learning that can be used by management educators as they design learning processes.
In this essay, we argue that specific characteristics and affordances of materials can be used to manage the emotionality of the learning process (Hinz, 2009; Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978; Landgarten, 1987; Malchiodi, 1998). Working on the assumption that greater emotionality produces greater learning (Zull, 2006), the choice and use of materials to manage that emotion may be crucial. Put bluntly, educators may intentionally select materials deliberately to improve learning processes.
Of course, just as the learning process is complex, materiality is also complex, and the interaction of materials, emotions, and learning resists overly simple hypotheses. Here, we take a step forward by exploring these relationships with an eye toward the practicalities of designing management learning processes. We start with a discussion of materials, media, and materiality, then move on to discuss the relationship between materials and emotions as well as the relationship between emotions and learning. Finally, we present a set of ideas about how materials can be used to increase emotional engagement in management learning processes.
Materiality, Media, and Materials
Management education happens in the material world. As management educators, we are often acutely aware of the material aspects of education. We are prone to complaining, for example, that “the seminar may have flagged somewhat last week, but the room was hot and the students seemed listless.” Such familiar comments imply that there is a relationship between the temperature in the classroom and the learning outcomes, and also that this relationship is mediated somehow by the engagement level of the students (and perhaps the engagement level of the faculty). And yet in spite of the ubiquity of this aspect of our experience, we lack formal theory that integrates materiality into pedagogy in an actionable way.
The concept of materiality can be used to describe the material context in which learning takes place, including the physical environs, the layout of the classroom, the weather, the quality of air in the room, and so on. In recent years, this concept has been much discussed by scholars in a variety of academic disciplines.
Bill Brown (2001), a professor of English, has given us Thing Theory. Anthropologists (e.g., Miller, 2005), archeologists (e.g., DeMarrais, Gosden, & Renfrew, 2004), and even organizational theorists (e.g., Orlikowski, 2007) have taken a new interest in materiality in the past decade. And yet, inquiring into materiality remains a difficult pursuit. For example, consider the problem of “the humility of objects” (Miller, 1987). Drawing on Goffman’s (1975) and Gombrich’s (1979) work, Miller argues that material objects are important because of their capacity to determine our expectations and ensure normative behavior—consider the traditional MBA case room that enforces norms of teacher-centered discussion. The methodological problem for research is, however, that this capacity appears to work only to the extent that we remain unaware that it is working, and as soon as we become conscious of it, the effects diminish or disappear completely.
Taking a step back, we recognize that among philosophers, materiality is a metaphysical concept. In the speculative Western tradition, the material is juxtaposed to the spiritual, a crucial dualism that helps differentiate present from future and past, actual from potential, temporal from eternal, alive from dead, and so on. The “end of metaphysics,” much discussed among contemporary Continental and postmodern philosophers, hinges crucially on the collapse of this dualism and a problematization of the concept of materiality. Perhaps the most influential contributions have been presented by Marx, Adorno, and Heidegger, but contemporary philosophy is animated by different voices speaking about materiality, including its relationship to topics such as history, gender, politics, and applied ethics. While management educators have considered how these topics bear upon management education, the issue of materiality has not been directly interrogated.
Consider, for example, the recent Carnegie Foundation report, “Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession” (Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, & Dolle, 2011). This document reflects carefully on how epistemological assumptions about scientific management have shaped a generation of business school curriculum design and argues that what is most needed today is the integration of the humanities with professional business education. But even as authors emphasize the importance of experiential learning in the development of the capacity for practical reasoning, the specific topic of materiality remains tacit in their analysis.
Within the broad spectrum of issues pertaining to materiality in management education, we focus in this essay more narrowly on the use of materials, which we distinguish from media. Media refers to the various forms in and through which we communicate information, such as video or text. As management educators, we all make choices about which media to use when we choose to show a video (e.g., Hunt, 2001; Smith, 2009) rather than having students read a case description or give a lecture on the topic. Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously proclaimed that “The medium is the message.” The significance of this provocative claim has been debated at length in the field of communication studies (e.g., Fulk, 1993) and organizational theorists have considered its relevance to marketing (e.g., Reid, 1993), strategy (e.g., Kozinets, 1999), and human–computer interaction (e.g., Pentland, 2004).
By contrast, the term materials refers to the objects—the physical stuff—that we use while teaching, such as when we ask students to make paper towers (Hunsaker, 1979), create culture collages (Colakoglu & Littlefield, 2011), paint a strategic vision (Maranville, 2011), or answer poll questions with electronic clickers. While these two concepts (media and materials) may overlap and blur together in the course of practice, we can distinguish them analytically by stating that with media, students take the role of producer or audience whereas with materials, students take the somewhat more banal role of user.
The use of materials is, however, a central feature of most arts-based management education, a long-standing field of practice that has received increased attention from organizational theorists in recent years (Adler, 2006; Taylor & Ladkin, 2009). Although a variety of familiar management learning outcomes are reported in the empirical research on arts-based learning, such as improved leadership (Buswick, Creamer, & Pinard, 2004), communication (Grisham, 2006), and interpersonal skills (Corsun, Young, McManus, & Erdem, 2006), there is a strong tendency in this literature to focus on the sorts of learning outcomes that we associate with the arts, such as learning to improvise (Cowan, 2007) and becoming more creative (Lengnick-Hall & Lengnick-Hall, 1999). The literature also commonly associates arts-based learning methods with the experience of richer, more positive emotions, such as becoming more energized (Burgi, Jacobs, & Roos, 2005), an increased ability to experience empathy (Dow, Leong, Anderson, & Wenzel, 2007; Grisham, 2006) and trust (Grisham, 2006), as well as feeling more emotionally safe (Oliver & Roos, 2007).
Organizational researchers have begun to develop descriptive theories of how arts-based learning processes function in general. Darso (2004) has, for example, offered a process model of using the arts within organizations that focuses on putting aside normal ways of thinking and seeing things in a new way, while remaining fully open to our internal world. The model focuses on individual experience, and the role of materials is described primarily in terms of novel sensory inputs. Taylor and Ladkin (2009) provide an alternative conceptualization that focuses on different processes that can be involved in arts-based approaches to learning, including skills transfer, illustration of essence, projective techniques, and making. While this theoretical account suggests that materials may help determine the nature and quality of the four processes, Taylor and Ladkin acknowledge that further empirical research is required to explore precisely what role materials play.
Before we continue by exploring these questions in this essay, it should be emphasized again that management educators and organizational development practitioners who use arts-based methods have for many years been identifying such differences and choosing materials to achieve specific objectives in specific contexts. For example, Jacquie Lowell suggests matching the art form to the population: “visual thinkers will prefer exercises involving art materials, kinesthetic thinkers will prefer exercises involving movement, and auditory thinkers will prefer music or conversation” (quoted in Van Gundy & Naiman, 2003, p. 22). Miller (2000) similarly conceptualizes the choice of art forms as being linked to sensory channels. And yet however useful these notions may be, they do not satisfactorily explain why clay would produce more conflict than LEGO bricks, since both those materials would fall within the same kinesthetic sensory channel.
In summary then, it seems clear although materials are frequently employed by management educators, we currently lack a theory to describe or predict the effects that these materials might have on the learning process or outcomes. The organizational theorists who have focused on the use of materials associated with the fine arts have focused primarily on what is happening within the individual learner, whether in terms of openness to inside and outside worlds (Darso, 2004), processes of artistic expression (Taylor & Ladkin, 2009), or channels of sensory perception (N. Miller, 2000; Van Gundy & Naiman, 2003). We believe that the specific question concerning why LEGO might have a different effect than clay on a group learning process requires, however, a more holistic or relational perspective that considers the interactions between people and things in the material world in terms of the effects that these interactions can have on learning. In the following section, we explore the field of expressive arts therapy in search of such a perspective.
Materials and Emotion
While management educators (such as ourselves) may find it surprising when the Banff facilitator says that there is always more emotion and conflict with clay than there is with LEGO, in an adjacent field, people may not find it surprising at all. Since the initial development of art therapy shortly after World War I, art therapists have been carefully choosing the materials they use in the therapeutic process, and over time, they have largely converged on a set of ideas about the relationship between materials and expressed emotion.
Generally speaking, therapists seek actively to manage the amount of expressed emotion in the therapeutic process because their concern is to be able to work with emotion-laden topics without being overwhelmed by the emotion. Crudely put, too little expressed emotion leaves them with little to work with, and too much can bring on potential damage. Within this tradition of therapeutic practice, the most well-established and comprehensive theory of the use of materials is in the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC) (Hinz, 2009; Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978; Lusebrink, 1990).
The ETC describes how various intrinsic characteristics and extrinsic affordances (Gibson, 1979) of the materials can have specific and unique effects on the healing process. At the heart of the theorizing about the relationship between materials and the process is the idea that materials “are perceived as the carriers of expression” and “the assumption that psychic energy is discharged or utilized through motor behavior” (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978, p. 172). This shift of analytic focus moves beyond a simplistic dichotomy between subjects and objects by allowing us to consider how materials can play a role in the expression of emotional energy. In this light, the characteristics and affordances of the materials affect the intensity of the use of emotional energy in the process. The various aspects of materials identified by the ETC are intended to provide practicing therapists with guidance for how to manage the emotionality of the therapeutic process by choosing and manipulating the inherent characteristics and affordances of the materials.
In response to the Banff scenario in the epigraph, the ETC suggests that the important difference between the clay and LEGO processes has to do with the fluidity of the two materials. More fluid materials such as clay elicit a more emotional process than more resistive materials, such as hard plastic LEGO bricks. Although the ETC may explain why there was more expressed emotion in the clay group than there was in the LEGO group in Banff, it does not directly answer the question about the relationship between materials and learning. The objective of the therapeutic encounter is typically characterized in terms of healing, and the healing process is concerned with understanding and working with the inner reality of the patient. The learning process in management education is often concerned with acquiring new skills and new ways of making sense of the organizational and business world. However, in some cases the learning process is concerned with self-knowledge, with exploring that same inner reality with which therapeutic healing is concerned—often in the form of psychometric inventories that reveal personal leadership-style preference, personality type (e.g., MBTI [Myers-Briggs Type Indicator]), and so on.
As we continue to consider the relationship between materials and learning, the key contribution of the ETC is that it allows us to think of the person working with materials as using emotional energy. The healing process is concerned with making sure there is enough emotional energy to work with, but not too much that it causes harm. Management education is generally not very concerned with the level of emotional energy in a formal way. However, as individual teachers, we are always striving to achieve greater “engagement.” We share exercises where the students seemed to be particularly engaged, or if you will, where there was a lot of emotional energy being expressed. It is as if we have an implicit theory that there is more learning going on when there is more emotional energy being expressed. The ETC frames the use of materials in terms of the activation of that emotional energy and suggests that facilitators can make choices about materials and how they use those materials to manage the level of expressed emotional energy among the participants.
But if art therapists consciously make choices about the materials they use as part of their effort to manage the amount of expressed emotional energy in the therapeutic process, it implies that there is some ideal or “goldilocks” level of expressed emotion in the therapeutic process. In the children’s story, Goldilocks is always looking for things that are just right, the chair that is neither too big nor too small, the porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold. Might there also be a goldilocks level of expressed emotion for managerial learning, which is neither too little nor too much? And if there is a goldilocks level of expressed emotion for learning, then could we, as management educators and learning process facilitators also make choices about the materiality of the learning process in order to manage that level of expressed emotion? And then, given a range of materials from which to select, how would the ability to directly manage levels of expressed emotion affect the outcomes generally associated with learning and education? With these questions in mind, we now turn to consider recent neuroscientific research focused on the relationship between emotion and learning.
Emotion and Learning
At a theoretical level, organizational researchers have long recognized that people are more than just disembodied heads, and that learning involves more than just cognition. Organizational researchers have long emphasized the complexity of the theoretical relationship between emotion and learning (e.g., Antonacopoulou & Gabriel, 2001; Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956; Craig, Graesser, Sullins, & Gholson, 2004; Sylwester, 1994), and more recently argued that “emotion and learning may be reconceptualized as two social processes that are interdependent constituents of all human experience” (Simpson & Marshall, 2010). For example, Bloom’s influential taxonomy of learning objectives differentiates between affective, psychomotor, and cognitive (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bloom & Krathwohl, 1956). David Kolb’s (1984) work on experiential learning has greatly influenced how scholars understand adult learning in organizations, and this body of research rests in part on the proposition that “learning involves the integrated functioning of the total person—thinking, feeling, perceiving and behaving” (A. Y. Kolb & Kolb, 2005, p. 194).
Although much of the work based on Kolb’s experiential learning theory has focused on differences in learning styles, we would like to ground our understanding of learning in three of the propositions on which the theory is built, “[1] Learning is best conceived as a process, not in terms of outcomes . . . [2] Learning is a holistic process of adaptation to the world . . . [and 3] Learning results from synergetic transactions between the person and the environment” (A. Y. Kolb & Kolb, 2005, p. 194). Because management education usually seeks to translate the particulars of experience into generalizable knowledge as quickly as possible (e.g., Meyer, 2003), these three propositions can easily slip from view. Kolb’s theory suggests, however, that whereas knowledge can be defined as being explicit and cognitive, the richness of experiential learning derives from the fact that it allows us to move between tacit, individual knowledge and explicit, social knowledge. In this light, an important part of individual knowledge is emotional in nature (Kayes, 2002). Vince (1998) argues that emotion plays a large role in experiential learning, and in particular, that anxiety can either discourage or encourage learning. If the students can hold their anxiety at bay, they can gain insight, but if the anxiety produces defensiveness and denial, learning is discouraged.
A practical application of this thinking is Shepherd’s (2004) focus on teaching entrepreneurs to manage the grief associated with failure to maximize learning. More recently, Liu, Xu, and Wetz (2011) offer empirical evidence that the expression of emotion is positively related to learning and the masking or hiding of emotion is negatively related to learning. Although there are many philosophical debates about the role of emotion in learning within the organizational studies literature, there seems to be a reasonable amount of agreement that emotion plays a central role, particularly in experiential learning. We see this idea confirmed by recent research in neuroscience. Zull (2006) summarizes the neuroscience research by saying, Emotion is the foundation of learning. The chemicals of emotion act by modifying the strength and contribution of each part of the learning cycle. Their impact is directly on the signaling systems in each affected neuron. (p. 7)
At first glance, this characterization suggests a rather simple relationship, where less emotion means less learning and more emotion means more learning. If we look at the extremes, this notion would suggest that if students had no emotional response at all, they would learn nothing, and they would learn more and more as they approached an emotional peak. At the low extreme, we can imagine a completely bored student who is not engaged in any way with what is going in the classroom and does not learn anything. At the other extreme, we can imagine someone who has an extremely intense emotional response and learns all too well—think posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—leading them to avoid that sort of experience. In such cases, there may be no cognitive insight and nothing that Vince or Kolb would call learning, but there is something neuroscientists would call learning. With posttraumatic stress, the extreme emotion changes patterns in the cerebral cortex, such that they cannot readily be changed back. That is to say the emotion has brought about learning that cannot easily be unlearned, and as a result the combat veteran with PTSD hits the floor whenever he hears a loud noise and cannot get to sleep unless he has a gun under his pillow.
This oversimplified picture of PTSD makes a critical point about the relationship between emotion and learning as it is understood by neuroscientists. Too much emotion brings with it a stress response, which inhibits rational thinking and cognitive learning (Wolfe, 2006). In other words, too much emotion produces learning that involves more of a conditioned behavioral response that is not under the conscious control of the individual. We believe that this type of conditioning is not the sort of learning to which management education aspires. But it also supports the notion that—somewhere between bored disengagement and traumatic stress response—there may be a “goldilocks” level of emotion, a level of emotion that maximizes or intensifies learning.
We strongly suspect that management education more often has the problem of being below the goldilocks level, lacking sufficient emotion in the learning process. Only on rare occasions do most management educators have to deal with the problem of too much emotion (e.g., Taylor, 2010). Wolfe (2006) suggests that educators who use simulations, role-plays, and real-life problems as part of the pedagogy can raise the emotional stakes for participants. In this light, the benefits associated with using materials are connected somehow with the relationship between emotions and learning. By bringing the neuroscientists’ idea that there is a goldilocks level of emotion in the learning process together with the art therapists’ idea that materials can be used to manage the level of emotionality in a process, we find our central idea. Educators can manipulate the level of student engagement by intentionally selecting materials and integrating them into a learning process and in so doing increase the effectiveness of that process.
Making Material Choices
We suspect that the goldilocks level of emotionality in the learning process depends on a wide variety of factors, such as the subject or content being learned, the emotional maturity of the students, the instructor’s comfort and sophistication with handling emotional charged interactions, and so on. Many of these factors are largely outside the instructor’s control as they design the learning process. However, the selection of materials and how they are used is within the instructor’s control and can be a valuable lever for getting the emotionality “just right.”
The core conceptual framework of the ETC posits different levels of information processing, starting with the kinesthetic/sensory level, followed by the perceptual/affective level, and the cognitive/symbolic level. Each level is a continuum with trade-offs between the two ends of the continuum. At the first level, more kinesthetic processing is at the expense of less sensory processing. At the next level, the trade-off is between perceptual processing and affective processing. Furthermore, it assumes that the first three levels are developmental and hierarchical, and that creative information processing can happen at each of the three levels.
Within the fuller explication of the ETC (Hinz, 2009), there are a variety of specific characteristics and affordances of materials that affect the therapeutic process in particular ways and thus can be used as to guide the design of those processes. In the following paragraphs, we adapt these design principles and apply them to management education, yielding a series of ideas and heuristics that can inform educators as they choose materials.
Fluidity
The ETC suggests that more fluid materials elicit a more emotional process. Materials such as wet clay, watercolors, and finger paints that have less inherent physical structure are called fluid because they flow easily. Materials with less inherent physical structure evoke less cognitive structure and organization in the individual’s internal response and thus greater emotionality (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978). For example, as watercolor paint flows outside the lines and into other parts of the painting, emotion that may have been contained by the cognitive design (as intended by the artist) is released. The continuum sketched by art therapists (e.g., Landgarten, 1987; Malchiodi, 1998) from fluid to resistive can translate to other arts as well. In the performing arts, improvisation would be more fluid than scripted work as it has less inherent structure. But in general, the suggestion here is that educators seeking to encourage expressiveness and emotionality should select more fluid materials.
Resistivity
Materials with more inherent structure are called resistive because they provide resistance to pressure. The ETC suggests that resistive materials tend to elicit more cognitive (i.e., less emotional) responses. The inherent structure of the materials evokes inner organization, containing the emotional response and eliciting a more cognitive expression in the individual. In the performing arts, techniques such as Image Theatre (Boal, 1995) that use the human body as a medium to create static sculptures would be more resistive than those that allow the body to move more dynamically. More resistive materials create a more regularly structured situation, reducing anxiety and producing an overall calmer state. This focus on the cognitive level can often occur at the expense of the other levels (Hinz, 2009)—in other words, the use of highly resistive materials could inhibit the affective, sensory, and symbolic processing that seems to be at the heart of many of the claims about the power of experiential learning.
Ambiguity of Form
Materials that allow for greater ambiguity of meaning encourage participants to make sense of the forms produced by relying on symbolic meaning from their own experience. Some choices such as sponge painting and abstract dance and movement work have a certain level of ambiguity inherent in the material. Many materials, such as clay, paints, and pencils afford either ambiguous or unambiguous forms to be created. The task definition can take advantage of a material’s affordance for producing abstract art products that are inherently ambiguous if facilitators want more symbolic processing and personal meaning making. Projective techniques (Colakoglu & Littlefield, 2011; Taylor & Ladkin, 2009) provide one concrete set of examples of this kind of activity.
Boundaries
The physical boundaries of a material can be used to limit or contain the expressive potential of the process. Material such as a block of wood to be carved has a clear physical boundary and small block of wood will allow for less expression than a large block of wood. Similarly, a large piece of paper allows for greater expression than a smaller piece of paper. In general, the boundaries of the material limit the space for emotional expression (Hinz, 2009; Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978), and the more room there is for the expression of emotion, the more emotion will be expressed. In the performing arts, we can think of musical instruments and the physical boundaries of various instruments in terms of the range of possible sounds. A percussion instrument would have less expressive potential than a piano. Recorded sounds would also be very boundary determined. In this sense, educators should use a material that is more boundary determined if they want to contain the potential expression. While containing emotion may be a common problem in therapeutic situations, in organizational settings, a desire to unleash emotion seems more common.
Quantity
Just as the boundaries can constrain expression, so too can the quantity of material (Hinz, 2009; Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978). Following the same logic, the more material that is available for the expression of emotion, the more expression of emotion there will be. A large can of paint provides the opportunity for more expression than a thimbleful of the same paint. For the performing arts, one of the key quantities is the available performance space. There is a greater opportunity for expression in a large open space than there is in a small confined space. At the same time, large quantities of material may be intimidating for some participants, just as a large theater space can be intimidating. As noted above, the challenge for most arts-based learning processes in organizations is how to encourage greater emotional expression, rather than how to contain and limit expression (as it often is in therapeutic situations). In this light, educators might use greater quantities of material and space for performance to achieve desired outcomes.
Mediation
The term ‘mediators’ refers to the tools that can be used to work with a material, such as a paintbrush or clay knife, or in the performing arts, a script. The use of mediators interrupts the flow of expression between the individual and the material and thus introduces greater reflective distance (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978). Greater reflective distance provides more of a cognitive orientation to kinesthetic and perceptual experience. Reflective distance also increases as participants move up the levels from the kinesthetic/sensory level through the perceptual/affective level to the cognitive/symbolic level. In general, there is a trade-off between reflective distance and arousal/emotional involvement (Hinz, 2009).
Reflective distance is important as it enhances cognitive processing, allowing connections to be made beyond the immediate context of the learning experience. These connections can also involve symbolic processing, the primary difference being that while cognitive processing is rational and logical, symbolic processing is holistic and intuitive. Again, it is interesting to note that holistic and intuitive processes are often mentioned as strengths of arts-based learning (e.g., Linstead, 2006). Nonmediated materials tend to enhance the affective aspects of the symbol, whereas mediated media enhance the universal aspects of the symbol (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978).
Kinesthetics
Materials that allow movement tend to release energy and reduce inhibitions. This is “based on the assumption that psychic energy is discharged or utilized through motor behavior” (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978, p. 172). This is not so much about the innate characteristics of the material but rather the affordances that it provides participants to work with the material. As above, certain materials are amenable to mediation with specific tools—in this sense, paint affords the use of brushes or fingers. Other materials afford different degrees of kinesthetic activity. For example, in the performing arts, dance and theatrical improvisation can involve whole body movement and be very kinesthetic. Clay can be pounded and actively worked in a way that watercolors cannot. Kinesthetic tasks can be an excellent starting point for arts-based learning processes because of their tendency to release energy and reduce inhibitions (Hinz, 2009).
Sensory Awareness
Different materials also afford the enhancement of various forms of sensory awareness that are, in turn, associated with deeper human emotions. This component of the ETC is based in the assumption that intense sensory experiences, such as a flight or fight response to a loud noise, stimulate very primitive fear responses. In contrast, less intense experiences, such as gently touching soft clay, can stimulate arousal (Kagin & Lusebrink, 1978). Often these emotions cannot be easily articulated by participants in organizational learning processes unless facilitators allow time and space to focus on sensation. For example, participants can focus on the sense of touching clay when given the time and space to knead it and feel its texture. In the performing arts, the guided meditations that are commonly used as warm-up exercises in theater direct the participants to focus on the sensory awareness of their own bodies. According to the ETC, these sorts of experiences ground participants in their direct sensory experience of the world.
Summary
In sum, the ETC directs our attention toward the inherent or intrinsic physical properties of materials, the affordances that these properties provide to learning process participants, and the intensity of emotions that the experience of working with those materials can elicit. While fluidity and resistivity form a kind of analytic continuum, the relationship between the other terms of analysis remains subject to determination in practice. For example, a fluid medium may be used in different ways to emphasize, or de-emphasize the ambiguity of the forms that are created. Similarly, a relatively resistive medium may be used to create ambiguous and/or unambiguous forms. In turn, a large quantity of resistive materials can take on a more fluid structure—think of the difference between one coin and a gallon jar of coins. The point here is to recognize how the affordance associated with any particular material depends in part on its intrinsic properties and at the same time also in part on the way those properties are deliberately deployed by an instructor, framed in the context of a particular task with particular directions, goals, time constraints, and interactions with other participants.
Illustration: LEGO Versus Clay
As an illustration of how these ideas might inform the design of learning processes, we can use them to think about the observed difference between clay and LEGO bricks that inspired this paper. Material fluidity suggests that because clay is more malleable and fluid, it brought forth the expression of more emotions than the LEGO did, and thus the potential for conflict among participants was actualized. Similarly, the idea of resistivity suggests that the more structured and resistive LEGO bricks called forth more cognitive (and less emotional) responses from participants, perhaps allowing whatever conflict might have been latent in the group to be transposed into an analytic discussion about similarities and differences among them.
The ambiguity of form idea suggests that the relatively amorphous physical properties of clay allowed participants to access richer symbolic meaning, though it remains unclear to what extent the deeper symbolism associated with clay might correlate with interpersonal conflict in a learning process. At the same time, not all LEGO bricks are created equal—some of them may appear relatively ambiguous in their three-dimensional geometrical abstraction while other bricks carry not only form (e.g., a hammer, a pump) but explicit, often quite specific narrative content (e.g., Star Wars figures, Harry Potter figures, etc.). In this sense, we might think that a pile of colorful LEGO bricks is no less ambiguous than a lump of clay, and that both these materials enable the construction of symbolic meaning more effectively than, say, the use of a work of literature that carries a great deal of explicit meaning even though it may be interpreted a variety of ways.
The limitations of our illustration become clear as we try to apply the other terms of the ETC. Both LEGO and clay appear to be relatively bounded in our illustration, especially as they were both presented to participants in piles on tables within a conference room setting, and they were both used by participants to perform carefully scripted (albeit open-ended) tasks. An increase in the quantity of each of these materials could increase their boundlessness—imagine, for example, if the learning process had taken place at a Legoland resort, or in a naturally occurring clay pit. Neither the groups using clay nor the groups using LEGO bricks used any type of mediation, though clay is often manipulated using a variety of tools and people do seem compelled to take pictures of models they have painstakingly built using LEGO bricks. Both clay and LEGO afford a similar degree of kinesthetic activity, though they may be different in terms of the fine or gross motor skills that they require to use. And finally, no effort was made in the illustration to focus participants’ sensory awareness on the specific physical properties and affordances associated with LEGO bricks or clay, though clearly the experience of manipulating a lump of green clay is quite different from the experience of manipulating a jumble of industrially produced, hard plastic toy construction materials. To the extent that these terms of the ETC shed light on the limitations of our illustration, they indicate possible avenues for future research.
Ultimately the question of whether to use LEGO or clay in the learning process would depend on a wide variety of issues (perhaps even including the practical issue of access to sufficient quantities of LEGO bricks and/or clay to with which to work). Broadening the question a bit, if we were designing an experiential learning process for our classroom, we might have a desire for more or less emotional expression based on our experience with our own student population and choose a more fluid or resistive media with which to work. We might also design a process that starts with sensory exploration to stir primitive and intimate emotions, then work kinesthetically to reduce inhibitions before finally working with ambiguous forms to encourage personal symbolic processing of the topic.
Cautions and Limitations
We must be careful when taking ideas from therapeutic traditions. Learning processes are not the same as therapeutic processes even though they may have similarities. Perhaps most importantly, therapeutic processes take place within the traditions and practices of therapy, which includes an ethic of care for the clients. We believe that all management education should involve care for the students’ needs, not just as learners, but as professionals and as humans. But especially when educators deliberately use materials to trigger emotional responses, they should be mindful of the potential power of such techniques and seek carefully to avoid triggering any traumatic responses.
Future Research
On reflection, we might say that the lack of emotional energy in so much of management education—think of the horror stories of distracted, disinterested, apathetic students—may derive in part from a lack of using materials, a lack of “doing” in the physical sense. Many of us try to encourage student engagement by selecting cases that will be “relevant” for the students, but what if relevance depended less on cognition and more on physical enactment?
Reflecting also on the example of the two groups that worked with clay and LEGO respectively, we now wonder, did the emotions expressed by the clay group optimally support learning or were they too “hot?” It is possible that the conflict and expressed emotion in the clay group were signs that they had passed the goldilocks point for maximum cognitive learning about the subject of sustainable leadership. It is also possible that the expressed emotion meant that they formed a deeper emotional attachment with the ideas around sustainable leadership and that what they learned stayed with them longer—even if it was less cognitively sophisticated. Future research that is sensitive to the complexity of the relationship between emotion and learning is necessary to explore these possibilities and generate knowledge about the relationship between materials (as well as the broader concept of materiality) and learning.
One starting point for future research in this area may be to follow the lead of Danish researcher Jaime Wallace (2010), who has inquired into the relationship between the materiality of different design artifacts (e.g., drawings vs. three-dimensional models) and the design process. Working from a phenomenological theory of transformative affordances, Wallace used a combination of three methodologies: (a) participant observation, (b) first-person action research (i.e., being actively engaged in the design process), and (c) visual ethnography, including video and photographic snapshots. He found that the different materialities of the design artifacts allowed different ways of seeing the design objects and provoked fresh thinking and insights. By his account, the materiality of the design artifacts changed the design process. This account of change does not appeal to a simple, causal model of that relationship, but rather dwells with the complexity of the relationship in a rich ethnographic description.
Important, if True: A Pragmatic Conclusion 1
What if the use of materials could increase the emotional energy in management learning process? What if that increased emotional energy could positively impact on the learning that occurs? What if we, as educators, could manipulate the quality and intensity of emotional energy in the classroom by carefully selecting and integrating materials that provided certain affordances? If the answers to these questions were yes, then it would have broad importance for the field of management education.
We write at a time when the relationship between business and society is in dramatic flux, not only in view of the ongoing fallout from the 2008 financial crisis but also in reference to the challenges associated with ecological sustainability. In this context, the means as well as the ultimate ends of business education are being debated in a variety of public forums. Is our field guilty, as some critics have argued, of allowing business students to “phone it in” (Glenn, 2011)? Does the lack of engagement in the educational process contribute to a lack of professional ethics among business practitioners?
As we noted above, the recent report from the Carnegie Foundation for Excellence in Teaching (Colby et al., 2011) advances the notion that the concepts and pedagogical techniques traditionally associated with the liberal arts can be meaningfully integrated with professional business education. More specifically, the Carnegie report calls for the use of experiential learning techniques as a way to promote the development of practical reasoning, a capability that allows people to make judgments and take actions even in complex and morally ambiguous situations. While the report presents a series of illustrations of such experiential techniques, including everything from simulations to service learning to internships, the authors do not reflect specifically on the material aspects of these experiences. From our perspective, as suggested by the title of this paper, these material aspects do matter, at the very least because they can impact the character and intensity of emotion involved in the learning process.
Our conclusion is nothing more or less than a pragmatic call for further use of materials in management education, and in parallel, further empirical research focused on the use of materials in management education. As educators, we have a perennial obligation to use pedagogical techniques that actively engage the students in the learning process. But in light of the criticism being directed at our field of late, we see an opportunity to experiment more with teaching methods that involve not only words and ideas, but actions and objects as well.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Ellen Speert for directing us to the Expressive Therapies Continuum as well as Fulton 214 (Pacey Foster, Erica Foldy, Danna Greenberg, Tammy MacLean, Peter Rivard, Rich Dejordy and Jenny Rudolph), participants in the 2008 Art of Management Conference, and the anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this article (in its many forms) for their constructive and insightful suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.