SESKAT
Improve education by giving facilitators a set of extra skills, thanks to the contact with Emotional Intelligence

In recent years, the importance of adequate emotional management has become established in educational language, in an application of Emotional Intelligence to the field of education. In fact, the term “Emotional Education” has been successfully coined. This is a new and key concept in teaching focused on students as a complement for intellectual contents, both as an independent or transversal subject. In fact, emotions have a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. This attentional and executive control is intimately linked to learning processes, as intrinsically limited attentional capacities are better focused on relevant information. Emotion also facilitates encoding and helps retrieval of information efficiently. There is a vast literature about emotions and teaching, what about adult training? Nowadays, teachers are trained in emotional skills and EI is included in most curricula, but the topic is out of discussion in adult training. Trainers and facilitators need to be trained as well as a basic element of the chain. So, Emotional Intelligence is currently a hot topic in adult training, particularly taking into account the specific issues of andragogy (adult education) and the particular needs and demands of adult learners, very different from those of children. This is why this project is necessary, because much has been written about EI and pedadogy, but few about its implications in the never ending process of lifelong learning. Summing up, and as an indispensable complement to technical and professional competences, there are what the researchers called “personal competences”, which reflect empathy, flexibility, tolerance, self-esteem and emotional stability. Taking these factors into account, our target group will be dual. – On the one hand, the final beneficiaries will be the participants in any adult training process (whether in-company or in another training institution or organisation). They will learn to identify and manage their emotions during the training process, as it has been scientifically proven (McLean, The Theory of the Triune Brain) that emotional management is closely linked to the success of the cognitive processes of learning and internalisation of concepts.
Objectives
MAIN OBJECTIVE: Improvement of education by giving the facilitators a set of extra skills and weapons for their performance thanks to the contact with Emotional Intelligence. In a second step, students and clients will benefit from those skills, generating better professionals and better citizens for the European society.
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
– Raise awareness of the importance of emotional intelligence in adult education.
– Highlight the particular implications of andragogy.
– Identify the most important emotions involved in the formative process and how those emotions affect the daily performance of trainers.
– Detect risks and opportunities of those emotions in the training process.
– Make trainees participants of a better management of their own emotions.
– Promote benefits of Emotional Education for adult educators.
– Improve the level of adult training.
– Promote exchange between adult educators and trainers, both at the regional level but also between countries. By creating training tools for improving skills and key competences of trainers and trainees, the consortium expects to achieve the overall objective of the project: highlight the importance of Emotional Intelligence and social skills (creativity, empathy, cognitive flexibility, teamwork…) in the new economic environment and globalised world.
Partners





