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Affective Learning in General Education
Susan Gano-Phillips *
University of Michigan – Flint
While working as a Fulbright Scholar at the City University of Hong
Kong and as a consultant to the Hong Kong General Education Initiative
during the 2008–2009 academic year, I made several presentations related
to affective learning, a topic familiar to me because of my training as a
psychologist (Gano-Phillips, 2009; Gano-Phillips & Friedman, 2009). This
manuscript expands upon those presentations in the hope that faculty will
become increasingly familiar with the purposes and value of affective learning
in higher education. As used throughout this paper, affective learning refers to
learning that relates to students’ interests, attitudes, and motivations. It is my
hope that this paper will demonstrate the utility of affective learning in course
and program design and will stimulate the application by faculty members of
affective learning principles in developing new General Education courses
and programs.
The historical roots of affective learning can be traced back over 60 years.
It was at the 1948 conference of the American Psychological Association that
a call was made to develop educational taxonomies or classification schemes
* Acting Assistant Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Michigan – Flint.