The other was looking to diffuse affective tension in the classroom. - this is emotional tension. This is the tension that exists for students when they are unsure whether they are up to the task of the expectations of the course and instructor. Or the tension that materializes when students are intimidated by the instructor or feel unsure about where they stand in relation to the rest of the students in the class. This is the kind of tension that as instructors we try to diffuse when we attempt to create a safe classroom environment.
On the other hand, having students constructively evaluate and consider the tension that is present between their existing mental models and the new knowledge that confronts them in the current course is to be cultivated. This is what the keynote speaker, Ken Bain was explaining that the best college teachers enable students to integrate new learning into their existing knowledge structure (deep learning) rather than simply wrapping the new knowledge around students existing mental models. Sometimes this requires students to break down and remake, from the bottom-up, their worldview in order to integrate new knowledge. When this happens, education becomes a transformative experience because students have been enabled by their learning environment to re-consider how they understood the world to be and as a result see the world with new eyes as a result of a new integrated and thus more robust knowledge structure.
