Past Program

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need for schools to be more caring and supportive of students’ social and emotional needs. It has illustrated the relevance of social and emotional learning (SEL) for children’s education and lives both in and out of school in order to help them develop problem-solving and decision-making skills, self-awareness and empathy.

This program of the Education for Tomorrow’s World series looked at current and potential future SEL practice in countries around the Mediterranean, including a discussion of a proposed two-year multi-site research study aimed at identifying the opportunities and barriers for implementing SEL in educational settings around the Mediterranean basin.

OVERVIEW

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) helps children to develop competencies such as self-awareness and emotional regulation, problem solving and decision making, teamwork and collaboration, understanding and empathizing with others, embracing diversity and adopting constructive conflict resolution. It is based on the integration of cognition, emotion and behavior into a positive relationship model and social network.  

As has been increasingly clear during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, schools need to not only educate tomorrow’s workforce in “21st century skills” – Communication, Collaboration, Creativity and Critical Reflection – but to also be more caring and supportive of students’ social and emotional needs. The pandemic has illustrated the relevance of social and emotional learning for children’s education and lives both in and out of school.

This program – the second in an online series of programs as part of Salzburg Global’s Education for Tomorrow’s World series – looked at current and potential future SEL practice in countries around the Mediterranean. The program opended with the official launch of an edited book (to be published in October 2020 by Brill Publications) called Social and Emotional Learning across the Mediterranean: Cross Cultural Perspectives and Approaches (edited by Carmel Cefai, Dominic Regester, Leyla Akoury Dirani). The book is a direct output from the February 2018 program Mainstreaming Innovations in Social and Emotional Learning in MENAT.

The program also discussed a proposed new two-year research project looking at contextual barriers and opportunities for implementing SEL in formal and non-formal educational settings around the Mediterranean basin. This project will explore how different countries across the Mediterranean make sense of SEL, how relevant they find the construct in their respective contexts, particularly in addressing some of the main socio-cultural-economic challenges they face, and how they seek to adapt it to their own contexts to make it more culturally meaningful and useful.

All countries in the Mediterranean region are invited to participate in this project making use of a mixed method research design.