Why is Social-Emotional Learning Beneficial for Youth’s Storytelling?
By Bruce Wang
Emotions are easy to understand. Everyone knows the difference between happiness and sadness. If a teacher tells you “It’s important for you to be happy, " you will probably think this sentence has no value in your daily life. Wait a moment… If emotions are easy, why do many youths still have difficulty with maintaining positive emotions?
According to data collected by the United States Census Bureau from December 29, 2021, through January 10, 2022, more than 58.90% of young adults who are 18–29 years old have been feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge. Therefore, learning how to handle emotions is very important for youth’s well-being. The real problem is the wrong way to teach emotions.
How should we help youth to handle difficult emotions? First, we should understand how emotion happens. According to Barrett(2017), a well-known educator, emotions are formed by our brain to categorize similar feelings with similar events. For instance, if your feeling of playing with a cute puppy is very similar to the feeling of playing joyful music, then your brain will label those similar feelings as “happy”. Therefore, different people have a different “label system” because of different events they have been through. Happy may be an easy emotion that everyone can understand, but many emotions are hard to form. For instance, if students don’t have enough events to feel passionate, “passionate” is hard for their mind to form as an emotion, let alone understand it.
In order to manage emotions, we need to understand ourselves by exploring a lot of questions, such as how I define happiness, what makes me angry, what is my passion, etc. Lil’ Filmmakers uses storytelling as an interesting approach to helping students discover their inner voice and tell their stories to express their voices and emotions.
Lil’ Filmmakers has been teaching youth filmmaking skills for 14 years now. Based on our teaching experience, it is interesting that almost all of our talented storytellers are those who have the ability to express their inner voice and deliver their sincere emotions to the audience. Therefore, we used emotions as the approach to better help next-generation storytellers. Then, we realized that helping them understand other’s emotion and their relationships with society and the world is also important for them to develop advanced storytelling skills. As a result, we polished our storytelling curriculum, and embedded advanced social-emotional learning elements into our program to better prepare youth to be the next-generation storytellers.
For more information about Lil’ Filmmakers’ programs, please check our website: https://www.lilfilmmakersinc.com/
Reference
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
