Emotional literacy is awareness of how various emotional states are:
TRIGGERED – prompted by words, actions, people, situations, places, etc.
SUSTAINED – continued for a short time (e.g. minutes, hours, or days)
PERPETUATED – continued for a long time (e.g. years, decades, lifetimes, generations)
COMMUNICATED – engaged, facilitated, managed, and shared internally and externally
Emotional literacy means understanding how various emotional states impact Self, Other, and Community (see The Revelations of Asher: Toward Supreme Love in Self for more on this).
This literacy includes finding ways to identify and alter the evolution of emotional states in healthy ways.
It also includes a fairly complex understanding of ways to navigate social situations and interpersonal relationships that trigger (especially) negative emotional states.
Emotional literacy also includes the ability to self-generate consciousness that is affirming, compassionate, respectful, inclusive, joyful, peaceful, and strong no matter what is happening in life.
This awareness and agility comes from deep knowledge of one’s interior life and deep knowledge of holiness.
Proficiency in emotional literacy happens by self-partnering and self-parenting with all aspects of self as they voice and story within one’s interior. This proficiency leads to self-integration and self-actualization from the inside out.
Emotional intelligence is a result of emotional literacy.
We need emotional literacy to do emotional justice.
Jeanine Staples is Associate Professor of Literacy and Language & African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her book, The Revelations of Asher: Toward Supreme Love in Self, is an endarkened, feminist, new literacies event (Peter Lang, spring 2016). In it, she explores Black women’s terror in love. She produces research-based courses and methodologies that enable marginalized girls and women to realize internal revelations that fuel external revolutions.
Dr. Staples’ next book details the evolution of her acclaimed undergraduate course, The Philadelphia Urban Seminar. In it, she explores Supreme Love in schools. She shows how she generates curriculum and methodologies that incite anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist pedagogical stances among teachers interested in urban education and equity for all people in schools and society.