Dr Lynsey Helen Mori is a university English educator at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. She holds an EdD in Educational and Professional Practice and specialises in social emotional learning (SEL) and relational pedagogy in higher education. Her work explores how emotional awareness, metaphor, and critical reflection can support language learning and teacher well-being in the age of AI. She has presented and published on well-being, emotional analytics, and planetary-conscious approaches to education. E-mail: lynseymo@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp 

 

Introduction

English classrooms are emotional spaces full of anxiety, performance pressure, identity formation, and the quiet highs and lows of simply being human. Over the past few years teaching at Japanese universities, I’ve noticed that students’ performance often fluctuates not because of language difficulty but because they are exhausted, overwhelmed, or disconnected. At the same time, as a mid-career educator juggling research, parenting, and shifting hormonal rhythms, I have felt my own emotional capacity rise and fall in ways traditional lesson planning doesn’t account for.

This is also happening alongside a different kind of shift, the one where AI is increasingly mediating our decisions, habits, and attention. Algorithms predict our preferences, filter our information, and increasingly shape our sense of self. Many students are outsourcing cognitive load to technology for grammar, summarisation, notetaking, communication, and in some cases emotional regulation, using chatbots as therapists and conversational substitutes. If we do not intentionally cultivate emotional awareness and relational capacity in education, students may enter adult life highly efficient but emotionally under-resourced.

 

Why emotional learning matters now

 

For several years, I've been integrating Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into my English classes predominantly using the Six Seconds model—Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. We work with emotional vocabulary, values, decision-making, empathy, and purpose. These competencies are not “soft skills”; they are future-necessary skills in a world where content knowledge is no longer scarce.

Yet vocabulary is only a beginning. Students need ways to explore emotional states without turning the classroom into therapy and without being forced into vulnerability. Emotional insight must be relational, contextual, and voluntary, not coerced through well-meaning “share your feelings” activities.

 

 

The social context: Japan and beyond

 

Teaching in Japan adds layers of complexity. Many students live materially safe and relatively privileged lives, yet experience stress, isolation, and pressure to perform. Emotional expression is often muted or internal; harmony takes precedence over disclosure. This exists alongside broader societal forces such as competition, productivity, and comparison that shape identities globally. The collision of cultures, shifting gender roles, economic pressure, digital life, and mixed value systems means many young people are navigating identity without a clear map. We cannot assume emotional difficulty is a personal failing. Sometimes it is cultural, structural, ecological, or developmental.

Bullying, workplace exhaustion, karōshi culture (death or severe illness caused by overwork), social withdrawal, and the rising discussion of “customer harassment” in Japan remind us that emotional strain is both interpersonal and systemic. Students need tools not just to manage feelings but to relate to others across differences—social class, culture, ideology, values, pace of life.

 

Why I needed something new

 

After years focusing largely on internal emotional vocabulary and reflection, I began craving something more collective and embodied, something that could frame emotional experiences as relational, not private. So, when I encountered Anthony Willoughby at the JALT International Conference in Yoyogi during the autumn of 2025, the timing felt serendipitous.

 

Discovering territory mapping

 

Willoughby’s Territory Mapping approach, developed through the Nomadic School of Business, invites participants to map their relationship to place, purpose, community, and responsibility using metaphorical landscapes. The method has been used with corporations, governments, and indigenous communities across Europe, Asia and Africa to reveal unseen dynamics and develop collaboration.

Rather than focusing on inward feelings, his framework asks:

• What are you hunting?
• What are you protecting?
• What are you growing?

This spoke directly to what I was searching for—not answers, but a new way of seeing. A shift from introspection to connection. From isolated emotional experience to shared meaning-making.

 

Blending mapping with SEL

 

Inspired by that encounter, I began merging aspects of Willoughby’s approach with my SEL work. Instead of mapping territories, we map emotional conditions in relation to learning. Willoughby’s approach speaks in metaphor—mountains as obstacles, trees as growth, fire as community. What struck me was how metaphor allowed people to speak truths indirectly, with dignity and agency. Shifting the compass from charting the outer journeys of purpose, protection, and responsibility, I look to chart the inner weather – our energy, motivation, overwhelm, and sense of belonging.

Territory Mapping already relies on metaphor as an epistemic tool; symbols act as meaning-carriers that allow complex social dynamics to be externalised without reducing them to personal confession. My adaptation suggests using the same mechanism but shifts the domain from collective purpose mapping to emotional-cognitive mapping in university learning contexts.

Students map internal states using symbolic landscape elements—initially provided prompts (mountains, rivers, bridges), then expanded through self-generated symbols. This creates a semi-structured symbolic lexicon that supports emotional interpretation without therapeutic exposure.

The metaphor is not the curriculum—it is the container.

In class, students create maps of the emotional terrain they are learning from that day, forming their own symbolic language such as a bridge between confusion and understanding, a closed gate representing avoidance, or a quiet pond marking a need for calm focus. These are not decorative. They are narratives of emotional experience expressed safely and indirectly. There is no requirement to share deeply or explain everything. The map simply creates the possibility of dialogue without demanding it.

 

Why this works (without becoming therapy)

 

Many teachers want to incorporate emotions ethically but fear it may be overstepping into counselling, forcing vulnerability, or they’re misreading student disclosures and centering themselves instead of the learner. Mapping avoids these pitfalls because students choose what and how to symbolize. Metaphors provide emotional distance, so the focus remains on learning, and not a life story. Sharing is optional and controlled so support becomes collaborative rather than diagnostic. Instead of “Tell me how you feel,” the activity says, “Let’s look at what we're moving through today.”

It shifts emotional awareness from introspection to navigation.

 

 

A safeguard against emotional outsourcing

 

Young people increasingly use AI as a confidant, it’s conceived as private, non-judgmental, and it’s available 24/7. While helpful, it risks replacing relational emotional development with algorithmic responses that mirror back what users want to hear. This creates a lack of embodied empathy, may reinforce isolation, and shape identity through pattern prediction rather than dialogue. Mapping asks students to process emotion with others, and not alone in a chat window.

It teaches boundaries, co-regulation, perspective-taking, and collective sense-making These cannot be automated.

 

What happens in the classroom

 

Once symbolic language forms, group dynamics shift:

• A student sees someone else draw a “storm” and realises struggle is shared
• Students offer strategies without centering pity
• Group trust builds slowly, through metaphor rather than confession

 

Students told me mapping helps them:

• recognise overwhelm sooner
• ask for help with less embarrassment
• relate to classmates they would not normally speak to
• link emotional states to learning habits

It also helps me recalibrate my own positioning as a teacher in midlife—not in crisis, but in transition. I am renegotiating identity not as “teacher delivering content” but as “participant co-navigating evolving terrains.”

 

How to Try This

Keep it simple:

1. Give students a blank page
Title it “Where am I today?”

2. Offer 4–6 metaphors
Rivers, mountains, trees, storms, bridges, allies.

3. Let them draw without over-explaining
Interpretation belongs to the student.

4. Invite—but don’t require—sharing
One symbol, one sentence is enough.

5. Repeat periodically
Patterns emerge across time, not in a single session.

 

We cannot control the landscape students are growing up in.
But we can help them map it.

Not to fix them.
Not to diagnose them.
But to remember we are shaped in relation—with each other, with the world, and with the forces accelerating around us.

Mapping is not the answer.
It is a way of walking the path together.

 

References / further inspiration (plain 12)

Six Seconds. (n.d.) The Six Seconds Model of Emotional Intelligence. Available at: https://www.6seconds.org

Nomadic School of Business. (n.d.) Territory Mapping. https://www.nomadic-wisdom.com/ 

Willoughby, A. — Territory Mapping (Nomadic School of Business), online: https://www.territorymapping.pro/about-us.html

 

 

Please check the Pilgrims in Segovia Teacher Training courses 2026 at Pilgrims website