Emotions are an important component of rationality

Can you describe your background and how it has led you to working at EPFL?

I started my career as a physics teacher, I got my bachelor’s degree in physics and after four years in just pure physics I decided to get some pedagogical training to be a teacher.

After I got my bachelor’s degree I started working as a teacher in public schools back in Turkey. Then just one year later, in 2009, I started a master’s degree in science education, that is, on how to actually teach physics, chemistry and biology more effectively.

That wasn’t enough for me, so I then decided to pursue a PhD degree in the learning sciences. Between 2014 and 2018 I studied learning sciences focusing on culturally relevant pedagogy. It was the first PhD thesis in Turkey about culturally relevant pedagogy, which is a pedagogy that basically uses students’ academic achievement, cultural competency as well as sociocultural and socio-critical perspectives. During the teaching and learning process you usually consider their different cultural values, different perspectives, and different languages.

Then, in May 2021, I came here at EPFL to work as a postdoc in engineering education. I’ve been working with Roland Tormey who is my advisor since day one. Together we have been focusing on emotions in engineering education.

Why does that interest you specifically?

Engineering education and the engineering field in general, are mainly technocratic. Scientific problem-solving skills are considered more important, and the role emotions can play has been largely ignored.

So, Roland told me that he wanted to work on engineering ethics and figure out how we could include emotions in engineering ethics education.

Now, there are many, many kinds of emotions and because our main question pertained to ethics, we chose to focus on moral emotions. Our main purpose was to include some emotionality in engineering ethics case studies.

Usually, engineering students are warned not to involve their emotions in their moral decision making. They believe that emotions are going to affect their reasoning process and specifically their rational thinking. So, we designed an experimental study to see where emotionality would affect students’ rational thinking.

We did this by considering compassion as it is quite important when we make decisions because when you feel compassion, you consider others. For example, when you see others suffering, you feel compelled to change the situation, to act. The motivation to act is even stronger if you share some similarities with the person suffering. Considering these main elements of compassion, we decided to integrate it in engineering ethics cases by modifying an instrument used to measure engineering students' moral reasoning levels called ESIT, the Engineering and Science Issues Test. This instrument is based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.

The challenge was then to figure out how to include just one targeted emotion in this case study. Previous studies didn’t focus specifically on targeting one single emotion. After many tries, we managed to increase the targeted emotion’s intensity without affecting other emotions’ indicators. The literature tells us that the levels of emotions can’t be too high nor too low, or in other words, not in the extremes. That means that we had to increase compassion on a moderate level. We showed that low to moderate levels of compassion did not affect students' moral reasoning schemas.

Now the perspective and the main ideas on this have been changing and the number of articles and research focusing on emotions is growing day by day.

The prevalent idea used to be that emotions are the enemy of rationality but in fact, emotions are an important component of rationality. Now the perspective and the main ideas on this have been changing and the number of articles and research focusing on emotions is growing day by day. Ten or twenty years ago that wasn’t the case. By putting together my background as a physicist and now as a learning scientist and working with Roland Tormey whose background is sociology, we try to help engineering educators integrate all these dimensions into their teaching to improve it.

We’ve applied for different fundings to work on emotions. One project for example was funded by BeLEARN and with a group of professors and researchers from EPFL comprising Roland Tormey, Touradj Ebrahimi, Patrick Jermann and Vivek Ramachandran as well as Prof. Dr. Reinhard Riedl from the Bern University of Applied Sciences (Berner Fachhochschule), we’ve been researching how to teach engineering ethics using deepfakes and focusing on the emotional responses of engineering students when they are watching these deepfake videos with the aid of eye tracking and face recognition methods.

We have another project within BeLEARN working with a group of psychologists, namely Prof. Dr. Marina Fiori from the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training SFUVET and Prof. Dr. Egon Werlen from the Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences (Fernfachhochschule Schweiz – FFHS) as well as Roland Tormey and myself. We are currently working on the effect of social emotions in the learning process of computer science students when working in teams. We will look at their interactions and the way they manage these as well as the emotions that emerge in team settings with the aim of identifying pedagogical strategies to optimize learning while also minimizing inequalities.

What projects will you be working on next?

I am not going to teach, I’m going to learn with the students

This next semester I will be teaching a course for master’s students called “How People Learn” here at EPFL. Roland Tormey has taught this course for many years and this semester we will conduct it together. And to me I am not going to teach, I’m going to learn with the students. As a learning scientist I will share my experiences with them and as engineers they are going to share their experiences with me. So, we could even say that it could be called “How can we learn from each other?”.