How to talk to students about emotions in an interesting way?
There is still no educational program in Europe that would provide teachers and students with a comprehensive opportunity to work with emotions, develop them and show how to deal with them. That is why the Feel It! project was created as part of international cooperation, the aim of which is to develop the emotional and social competence of students within the framework of a combined educational program. He uses digital technologies, tools and concepts of distance education, works with the analysis of pop culture artifacts.
The intention of the project was to create an e-learning course intended for students. In the individual modules, the course deals with the topic of emotions, competencies that need to be developed, and pop culture artefacts that are used to describe emotions. At the end of each module, students are asked to create their own project about the emotions they have worked with during that part of the course. The emotions that students will work with during the course were chosen based on Paul Ekman's theory of basic emotions and they are: joy, sadness, anger and fear. Each emotion was also assigned competencies that will be developed through the content of the course, i.e.: empathy, interpersonal decentration, stress management, communication, cooperation, problem solving, active self-presentation, persuasion.
An innovative element of the course is the pop culture artefacts that underpin each module and are carefully selected to depict and given emotions. The innovation of the project lies in the fact that the basis of each module are pop culture artifacts appropriately selected for each emotion. The starting point for using pop culture as a method of emotion analysis was the assumption that pop culture is the natural world of young people's lives. It is where one learns patterns of behavior, social roles, and possible scenarios for one's own biography. Television series, shows, songs, music videos, comics and magazines are not only entertainment, but also (and perhaps most importantly) a vehicle for storytelling. Heroes of popular culture are involved in adventures and situations similar to those experienced by young people, experiencing similar fears, joys, hopes and dreams.
During the course, students will also become familiar with educational tools that they will use when creating their own projects describing emotions. The course introduces them to tools such as creating their own artifacts, digital storytelling, comics, role discovery and self-presentation on social media.
The course is available for free, it is a comprehensive program for the development of students' emotional and social competences.
The teacher cannot teach students emotional-social competence. However, it can help them learn to independently develop competencies and effectively use the tools of the 21st century.