Emotions - how they develop, how we “feel” and “live” them, how we express them, and their impact on our behaviors - have always sparked human interest. Emotions are, as we all know, a fundamental part of our daily lives, and all sentient beings experience emotions in one way or another.
However, we must also recognize that being “emotionally” (and consequently, socially) intelligent is not something we are born with. Many people struggle not only with managing their emotions but also with understanding them - sometimes feeling overwhelmed and unable to work well with themselves and others.
Worldwide, scholars and academics have investigated emotions from many perspectives: psychological, sociological, and neurobiological (Goleman, 1996; Lindquist et al., 2012), as well as educational (CASEL). Slowly but steadily, the idea that emotions are not just something we “carry around” but are much more - and that their impact is deeper than we might think - has found a place in educational discourse worldwide. Numerous publications, research projects, and initiatives now aim to understand how to help children, from a very early age, develop their own unique yet essential emotional and social literacy.
In Europe, in 2018, the Commission Department for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (EAC), together with the Joint Research Centre (JRC), developed an important framework named the LifeComp framework. It can be described as “a framework to establish a shared understanding on the ‘personal, social and learning to learn’ key competence”.
In the words of its creators, it is “non-prescriptive, and it can be used as a basis for the development of curricula and learning activities. The framework wants to help people to unleash their dynamic potential, self-regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. The aim is to build a meaningful life, cope with complexity, be thriving individuals, responsible social agents, and reflective lifelong learners.”
This section will take you through the essential core of the LifeComp framework but with an ambitious goal in mind: to extend its potential to younger children and kindergarten teachers, as this pivotal stage of human life and development is not addressed explicitly in the document. Therefore, this introductory part will analyze and engage with this groundbreaking document while trying to pinpoint a set of theoretical-practical indicators fit for the age range explored by the EduSkills+ SEL Project.
Browsing through the LifeComp framework’s main points, we will outline what can be translated into the kindergarten reality, with a keen eye toward providing educators with a new (or expanded) set of tools to work harmoniously and systematically with children on their social and emotional potential. This part is connected to and extended in Section 2.4.
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