The SESKAT project, which full title is: “Development of social and emotional skills in adult training” started 5 months ago, in March 2022. It will last for two years. The project’s number is: “2021-1-DE02-KA220-ADU-968E52D2“.
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 behaviour. 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, but there is a gap in adult training.
SESKAT project aims mainly to the improvement of education by giving the facilitators a set of extra skills and weapons for their performance thanks to the contact with Emotional Intelligence.
Other specific project objectives are:
- To raise awareness of the importance of emotional intelligence in adult education.
- To highlight the particular implications of andragogy.
- To identify the most important emotions involved in the formative process and how those emotions affect the daily performance of trainers.
- To detect risks and opportunities of those emotions in the training process.
- To make trainees participants of a better management of their own emotions.
- To promote benefits of Emotional Education for adult educators.
- To improve the level of adult training.
- To promote exchange between adult educators and trainers, both at the regional level but also between countries.
All in all, the overall objective of SESKAT project is to highlight the importance of Emotional Intelligence and social skills (creativity, empathy, cognitive flexibility, teamwork…) in the new economic environment and globalised world.
Regarding the target group of the project, this will be dual:
- 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.
- There will be also a focus on adult trainers, developing an emotional balance that reinforces their personal competences and improves their ability to transmit concepts from an interpersonal perspective.
SESKAT’s vision is to have a positive impact on the perception and awareness of social and emotional skills in the adult training process, improving the trainers’ capacities and the quality of the training, as well as their impact on the final beneficiaries.
The coordinator is the EBB Europass Berlin Beratungsbüro from Germany. That is why the Kick-off Meeting of SESKAT project took place in Berlin last week, on the 14th and on the 15th of July 2022. The coordinator hosted this first face-to-face meeting among partners and all the other 5 partners travelled to Germany to attend it:
Social Innovation Developing Experiences for all Sides from Italy, INDEPCIE from Spain,
Fundacja NOVA from Poland,
Innovation Education Lab from Romania and
Eurospeak Limited from Ireland.
Two representatives from the aforementioned organisations participated in it.
During the Kick-off Meeting, partners had the chance to discuss about the development of the first progress result and the next steps that will be taken and have to do with the organisation of the focus groups. Apart from those managerial issues were brought to the discussion and also any activities related to the promotion of the SESKAT project.
In total, during the lifetime of the SESKAT project, the following three results will be developed:
- Project Result 1 – A MAP OF TRAINING EMOTIONS led by INDEPCIE.
- Project Result 2 – THE EMOTIONAL TRAINER led by Innovation Education Lab.
- Project Result 3 – THE EMOTIONS OF LEARNING led by Fundacja NOVA.
For more SESKAT news, stay tuned!
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