Educating on emotions for effective learning

Abstract

Objectives Recent psycho-pedagogical literature has given importance to the thought-emotions relationship, which can no longer be seen in a disjunctive (aut-aut) but rather interconnected (et-et) perspective because the intellectual life of each of us is traversed by affects, feelings and relationships. Material and methods This contribution seeks to highlight how the didactic-educational process and the discourse on emotions for effective learning, today, cannot disregard the pedagogical relevance of a socio-emotional education universally referred to as Social Emotional Learning (SEL). Hence the need for a profound rethinking of the pedagogical vision and awareness that the affective-emotional-relational constitutes the conditio sine qua non of cognitive development. Results in recent decades extraordinary results have been achieved thanks to the unthinkable progress of neuroscience, which has shown how cognitive and emotional processes can be traced back to and identified with structures and functions of the human brain; one thinks of the cognitive functions, linked to the activities of the associative cerebral cortex, and of the emotional functions linked to certain centres of the limbic system, and in any case both regulated and determined by various chemical substances and by the neurotransmitter system. Conclusions I believe that pedagogy can and should benefit from the discoveries in this field by taking on the task of understanding and enhancing the developmental capacity of the brain-mind: in this way, it is possible to plan a training strategy that uses the environment to allow the highest and best development of mental potential.

Keywords

• education
• emotions
• relationship
• learning
• person