Learning as Lived Passage

The European University Institute Mood Arc Pilot

How do students stay engaged when courses deal with migration, climate change, technology, or planetary governance?

How do they remain oriented when questions grow larger than ready-made answers?

These were the conditions in which the Mood Arc was piloted at the European University Institute (EUI) by Professor Kalypso Nicolaidis during the autumn of 2025, within the Master of Arts in Transnational Governance (MTnG) course.

Rather than adding another assessment tool, RIZOM introduced a light reflective structure designed to make learning legible as experience.

The Context

Advanced courses increasingly operate at the edge of certainty. Students are asked to grapple with abstraction, uncertainty, and ethical tension, often across disciplines and scales. At the same time, generative AI tools are reshaping how academic work is produced, raising questions about authorship, judgement, and formation.

The Mood Arc was designed as a response to this landscape. It did not aim to regulate tool use or evaluate performance. Its purpose was simpler: to protect the inner movement of learning.

What was Done

Across five sessions, students were invited to respond twice:

• At the opening of the class, with a short metaphor or image capturing their stance

• At the closing, returning to notice what had shifted

Responses were anonymous, limited to five to fifteen words, and submitted via QR code. Some prompts were accompanied by artworks curated from the ArtCentrica library, others by text alone. Each week, students received an anonymised “Mood Album” reflecting the collective imagery of the cohort.

Participation was voluntary and non-evaluative.

What Emerged

Three dynamics became visible.

First, engagement was immediate and sustained. The low threshold of the task and its non-judgemental nature encouraged participation, even as topics became more demanding.

Second, shared imagery evolved alongside course themes. Students naturally moved from metaphors of navigation and vessels, to ecosystems and regeneration, to portable forms of belonging, and later to horizons and thresholds. This indicated symbolic processing rather than mechanical response.

Third, the pilot revealed a clear stress and recovery pattern. When highly abstract content was paired with abstract visual material, participation dropped sharply. When concrete anchoring was reintroduced, engagement recovered without simplifying the intellectual challenge. This showed that coherence is a design choice, not a function of reduced complexity.

Why it Matters for Pedagogy

The Mood Arc surfaced something often invisible in higher education: formation over time.

Rather than asking students whether they had learned, the practice showed how their understanding moved. It supported:

• Trust in difficulty, allowing uncertainty to be held collectively

• Identity formation, without fixing individuals into types

• Cohort cohesion, especially in newly formed groups

• Slow thinking, protected from acceleration and optimisation pressures

In an AI-augmented context, this matters. When polished outputs can be produced quickly, the risk is bypassing transformation. The Mood Arc makes learning inspectable through change, not compliance.

What this suggests

The EUI pilot indicates that symbolic, minimal design can act as a resilient container for complex learning. When abstraction overwhelms, recovery depends on anchoring rather than explanation. When students feel safe to revise their stance, they stay with difficulty longer.

This makes the Mood Arc particularly relevant for:

• Any learning environment navigating AI integration and ubiquity

• Civic and political education

• Systems thinking

• Leadership and governance programmes

The practice does not replace teaching or assessment. It restores orientation, continuity, and presence where these are most at risk.

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