Abstract:

In traditional education, teachers used to control emotions within the classroom, making their students see the need to subject their emotional reactions to judgments based on critical think, instead of looking for their origin and trying to harness their potential. Although it is true, as the children grow, matures, and digging reflections are required of them, which marks a notable predominance of thought over emotions.

However, since the last century, studies have been carried out that have allowed us to understand the functioning of the human brain. Nowadays, no one doubts the role that neuroscience has in education. We know that the study of emotions and their understanding can help teachers to energize their classes and empathize with the students. In this case, it is necessary to bind together all educational stages, not only focusing on primary or secondary education.

This work has been conceived with a double objective. On the one hand, it is intended to provide professionals with a summarized theoretical framework with some of the most representative and recent studies on the management of emotions. This is done from a pedagogical approach, in which the classic concepts of psychology and neurodidactics are interrelated with university teaching. Knowledge of these studies can serve as a tool for university teachers who constantly interact with people in an emotional setting. Also, it is convenient to know how the attitude of the teachers when giving a certain session can trigger a greater or lesser understanding of the subject taught. There is no doubt that teachers link their values and emotions with the ideas and theories they teach in their respective subjects.

On the other hand, fieldwork has been carried out with a questionnaire to manage emotions among engineering students, who have been affected by the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 disease, which has forced us to go from face-to-face learning to tell teaching. This survey allows us to approach the emotional state of the students and the management of their emotions in an atypical university academic year like the present. Their opinion is also presented regarding the characteristics and challenges of online teaching, the distance between student, teacher, and classmates or the strengths that students have perceived from this distance learning modality and how they expect the results to be classes in the future after the pandemic ends.

Keywords:

Emotions, neuroscience, engineering students, online education, COVID-19.