Socio-Emotional Learning and Human Flourishing

The development of social and emotional competences is a crucial aspect of human flourishing. These competences, including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, interpersonal skills and responsible decision-making, have been found to demonstrate effective improvements through social and emotional learning (SEL) programs. An analysis of the recent literature on emerging SEL approaches was conducted to provide an overview of current educational proposals, highlighting their strong and critical areas and outlining the lingering challenges, particularly in terms of the necessity to define the theoretical foundations of the programs with utmost clarity and conduct rigorous research on their effectiveness. In light of the aforementioned considerations, this article presents an innovative SEL program entitled The Nous Project that responds to the recommendations highlighted in the literature. Developed for primary school children, The Nous Project is based on a philosophically-grounded theory of socio-emotional education, which primarily focuses on the role of emotional self-understanding. Consequently, the primary objective of The Nous Project is to foster students’ knowledge of their own emotional dimensions and their ability to understand their own emotions. This is achieved by involving them in keeping a reflective diary, where they write down their emotions and analyse them on the basis of a metaphor. The effectiveness of this activity will be discussed starting from the presentation of the findings emerged from the qualitative analysis of the diaries collected during the pilot implementation of the program.