Overview
A student recently wanted to show me the cracked screen protector on his phone. I’m not sure why he needed me to see this but it mattered to him. I replied that the screen protector on my phone was also cracked and he asked to see it. So I shared with him the cracked protector. My phone’s screen has also started to deteriorate and the child remarked “oh, you’ve got the green line”. I replied in the affirmative. I should just clarify, neither of our screens were cracked, just the protector. But somehow, this became an important moment of sharing or him. And I got to wondering about the importance of phones for emotional regulation, and other objects too. These objects become part of our identity and inclusion into groups. Whether it’s a class asking what football team I support, or what music I listen to, students need some cultural tissue to be present in the room that is an identifier for themselves.
This is why we put up rainbow flags or stickers around our rooms. We are placing the regulatory, emotional or inclusive ‘touchstone’ into the room so that individuals can see their presence is legitimate. In placing the icon of the LGBT community, we are welcoming them as a group symbolically. Whether the item is a flag or a phone, they are identifiers of one’s personhood.
I’m notoriously rigid about my room which isn’t a strong identifier of my identity. It’s full of learning materials, not cultural of identity materials. Other teachers fill their rooms with personality that students can connect to. The rooms of other teachers sometimes feel like a teenager’s bedroom. And I can trace back the origin of this pathway – I used to have a huge mountain biking poster in my classroom when I was an NQT. One morning I arrived to find it had been taken down, folded up and stuffed beside the desk. It implied that a teacher’s identity was not part of the learning environment, and I haven’t added any more since.
Another key indicator of inclusivity is through football team affiliation. Every class I teach at some point or other, usually near the start of our relationship, comes to ask me what football team I support. I don’t engage in football, and revealing that I have no affiliation immediately outgroups either the student from me, or the me from the class. Another way of thinking about these emotional or regulatory touchstones is that of ingrouping and outgrouping. Knowing affiliation is an abstract rather than concrete touchstone, but it can be just as powerful tool for inclusivity.
There is also some notion of familiarity too – when students enter a classroom and a discipline, the conceptual content is entirely alien to them. Strangeness will almost always outgroup people. But having touchstones that are familiar to students means the space matches their visual or experiential maps. Familiarity breeds acceptance. So it’s not just a way of indicating to students – you are welcome because you are part of a welcomed group – it’s a way of making the physical space look and feel familiar.
When talking to students about difficult topics, I will often expand the discussion into analogies – especially to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is being less relevant as times progress). The effect of this is immediate, almost magnetic attractive qualities between student and learning. The analogy doesn’t have to work, but by raising the familiar experiences of students in a learning space that often feels very ‘excluding’ makes a significant emotional difference to students. Dirt bikes, wheelies, tik tok and any other sub-culture increase the ‘presence’ of the experiences that students know.
So what is the importance of these touchstones? And do they belong in the classroom? This article outlines the theoretical foundations, functional categories, mechanisms of action, and practical applications of emotional touchstones and ends with a question; if students’ phones have become a key regulatory and emotional touchstone what are we going to replace that function with if they are banned?
Conceptual Definition
I am defining Emotional Touchstones as personal artefacts that support emotional regulation by providing students with symbolic, sensory, and identity-based cues of safety and belonging. They are portable anchors that help students tolerate transitions, manage uncertainty, and sustain engagement with disciplinary tasks. Their very presence is a tool for settling behaviours.
Touchstones may be visible (a football, a photo, a book) or discreet (a keychain, bracelet, or small object kept in a pocket). Their power lies not in the object itself but in the meaning it carries. The meaning I feel is powerful here is about identity and inclusivity.
Although it is something I have begun to think about only recently, there is an academic history validating the concept.
Theoretical Foundations
Attachment Theory: Secure Base Cues
Attachment research demonstrates that children benefit from symbolic reminders of attachment figures or identity groups. These cues reduce physiological arousal and support exploration. In school contexts, emotional touchstones act as portable secure bases, helping students tolerate separation, unpredictability, and academic challenge.
Sociocultural Theory: Mediating Artefacts
Vygotskian theory positions tools and artefacts as mediators of thought and behaviour. Emotional touchstones function as mediating artefacts for emotional states, enabling students to regulate themselves in order to participate in disciplinary activity. They are part of the cultural toolkit students use to navigate the social and cognitive demands of English.
Self-Regulation and Co-Regulation Research
Contemporary regulation research identifies the importance of:
- sensory grounding
- identity continuity
- predictable routines
- non-verbal regulatory strategies
Core Functions of Emotional Touchstones
Emotional Continuity
Touchstones provide stability across transitions: home to school, corridor to classroom, break to lesson. For anxious students, transitions are moments of heightened vulnerability. A touchstone offers continuity, reducing emotional load and enabling smoother entry into learning.
Identity Coherence
Objects such as sports equipment, books, fandom items, or cultural symbols affirm identity. Identity coherence is a regulatory resource: when students feel anchored in who they are, they are better able to tolerate challenge, ambiguity, and academic risk-taking.
Sensory Grounding
Touching or holding an object activates tactile and proprioceptive pathways that calm the nervous system. This embodied regulation supports attentional control and reduces the likelihood of emotional escalation.
Cognitive Offloading
Touchstones provide a non-verbal strategy for managing emotional load. Students do not need to articulate their distress or rely on verbal self-talk; the object itself performs regulatory work.
A Typology of Emotional Touchstones
Emotional touchstones ultimately reflect the identity of the student, which might be a part of the structure of the learning environment. This mirror for the student is in the room before even the student is, and so the student arrives to a version of themselves. This is very difficult when there are 30 students in a class, and maybe five classes a day using that room, making at least a minimum of 150 student identities to symbolise.
Instead, it might be possible to establish patterns within the class that reduce the total range of touchstones being used. The following could be ways of thinking about the touchstones.
Concrete forms
Physical displays of paraphernalia, posters or iconography places the familiar world around the student.
Abstract forms
Conceptual ideas, talking points and values aren’t just a way of analogising the challenging knowledge domain of the discipline, it is a way of generating familiarity and ingrouping.
Sub-cultures
All students are part of some sub-culture, which is often musical, artistic, sport or other – by recognising patterns in those sub-groups and bringing those into the learning space increases the accessibility of the environment for the students.
Demographics
Wealthy, political, family, education and profession metrics might be used to validate the lived experience of all students.
Implications for Disciplinary Literacy in English
English is a discipline that demands:
- tolerance of ambiguity
- sustained attention
- emotional engagement with texts
- interpretive risk-taking
- reflective thinking
These demands can be overwhelming for students experiencing anxiety or dysregulation. Emotional touchstones support disciplinary participation by:
Enabling Entry into Textual Worlds
Students who feel emotionally anchored are more able to enter complex fictional or non-fictional worlds without becoming overwhelmed.
Supporting Interpretive Risk
Regulated students are more willing to offer interpretations, challenge ideas, and engage in dialogic discussion.
Sustaining Cognitive Presence
Touchstones help students remain present during extended reading, writing, or analytical tasks.
Enhancing Belonging in the Disciplinary Space
When students feel safe and recognised, they are more likely to see themselves as legitimate participants in the discipline of English.
A Non-Deficit Reframing
Traditional approaches treat regulation objects as signs of immaturity or deficit. This framework rejects that view. Emotional touchstones are cultural tools that students use to navigate the emotional demands of schooling, and when teachers use the learning environment as a way of reflecting the identities of the students, we increase the accessibility of the environment. Emotional touchstones are part of the broader ecology of disciplinary participation, not a remediation strategy.
This reframing aligns with contemporary sociocultural theory and supports a more humane, inclusive, and academically rigorous approach to literacy development.
Final thoughts
My teaching has always been at its most powerful when students feel connected to the space. We usually do this by celebrating work through wall displays, but this itself causes a conflict of comparison. Students with poor work won’t make the display, or deficient work will be placed next to high grading work only furthering the contrast between students.
Teachers often build rooms around themselves and their own identities (I certainly did), which is great when students share in that sub-culture but further excludes students who are being outgrouped by the bias of the touchstones.
One method that I have deployed which did work quite well, was to capture the best phrases of students in discursive lessons, to note them down and turn them into ‘memes’. These were kept in a folder of images with the student’s caption, an associated image, credited to the student, and left on random slideshow. The projector become a dynamic display of things the students said and they would look through the sideshow for new additions. It was their voices held high on the wall, and all students say something of value all the time.
These emotional touchstones place a mirror, or version of the student in the room before they even arrive making it an inclusive environment that feels familiar and accepting – a space to which they are ingrouped, a-priori, through their identity and not their academic progress. I think this is the classroom the students want to be in and one that teachers should work on building.
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