Emotion in Informal Learning as Mediated Action: Cultural, Interpersonal and Personal Lenses

Emotion and affect are important but undertheorized and under researched elements of learning in informal contexts such as science centers, museums, zoos, and aquariums. An interactional and discursive approach to emotions as mediated action was used to develop a three-part framework for documenting and exploring the place of emotional expression among family groups (n = 10 groups; 33 individuals) visiting an ocean exhibit in an interactive science museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Among our results, we observed that the most commonly expressed emotion was surprise, excitement, amusement and curiosity; the most frequently occurring categories of emotional expression among the families in interaction were those associated with being actively engaged in positive emotional interaction. Transcripts of interaction are presented to illustrate the framework and examined in light of emotional expression as a mediator of 1) active, collaborative, meaning making; 2) learner agency and protagonism; and 3) empathy. Results from the entire data set are interpreted using the Core Affect Model of Engagement. We present examples of and discuss how and why a mediated action approach to emotion as a social, distributed, interactional and discursive phenomena may be helpful both for advancing the study of emotion as an aspect of informal learning and exhibit design.