Available for Interviews: Nadine Levitt
Nadine Levitt is an education advocate, speaker, and the CEO & Founder of WURRLYedu, an educational technology platform. Nadine specializes in the social-emotional curriculum (SEL), and she is also the author of the children’s book, My Mama Says Inside Me Lives a Village.
What Nadine Levitt can say in an interview about
Facebook and Our Emotional Response to Polarizing Content:
Whistleblower Frances Haugen claims that the issue around Facebook allegedly knowingly causing harm is due to a conflict of interest between their growth in revenue and engagement and the public interest. In 2018 Facebook introduced an algorithm that relates to how content is offered to users, specifically choosing to show whatever type of content the user engaged with the most in the past. Hauge explained, “It is easier to entice people with anger.”
Author and education advocate Nadine Levitt would like to unpack why that is the case:
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- Anger creates an alarm response in your body, which is designed to get your attention! Because emotions don’t come alone, they come in groups, the accompanying emotions are also often designed to create an alarm response, and this is what sets off the loud wall of thought patterns.
- Less challenging emotions like happiness and joy, don´t motivate any change, they simply reward you with dopamine and other chemicals.
- Our brains are programmed to recognize patterns and use those patterns to try and predict the future. But those patterns are usually not based on fact—they are based on the stories we tell ourselves.
- So when we see content that elicits an emotion with an alarm response, like anger, our brains immediately kick into story mode recognizing patterns, and then we need to try and fact-check that story by searching for more content.
- Some advice:
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- With practice, you can become faster in your awareness that you are being sucked into a story. When you feel this momentum, stop and step away.
- Diversify where you get your content from, and try perspective-taking, which will foster greater empathy.
- Avoid comparisons as much as you can. The posts you are seeing are only an aspirational representation of everyone’s life (at best!) And remember, perfection is not attainable.
- Emotional intelligence is a learned skillset, so set yourself up with simple rituals that develop your skills.
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Interview: Nadine Levitt
Nadine Levitt is a Swiss-born, German, Kiwi, American thought leader, speaker, and author who is passionate about education, especially focusing on child emotional wellness, social and emotional skill development using the Arts, and EdTech.
In 2015 she founded the technology company WURRLY, which also makes WURRLYedu—a leading music education solution being used in schools across 22 states. Nadine has authored two children´s books for social and emotional learning (Inside Me Lives a Village and Inside Me Lives a Superhero), initially developed as a tool to use with her own kids, to help them develop positive self-awareness, self-regulation skills, confidence, empathy, creativity, and self-expression. This quickly grew into a school program, with the development of a supporting curriculum and classroom resources, and toys and other children’s products that foster a healthy relationship with emotions.
As an education thought leader, Nadine Levitt gives keynote speeches around the world on the subjects of music education, social and emotional learning, and technology in classrooms.
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