The Future of Education

In our talk, we would like to present the APP “Being here”, and its use within a course on emotional skills, taught at University of Applied Science of Southern Switzerland, a college for teacher education based in Locarno, in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland.

It is common knowledge in the psychological field that the idea of Emotional Intelligence [1] is concerned with the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions. In this course, beside the usual lectures and activities, we utilize an APP, that can be downloaded for free for Apple and Android systems. During the days among classes, three times every day, students are asked to stop and think about their emotional state in that precise moment, and register that with the help of “Being here”. A software allows us to receive (anonymously) information about our students feelings, where they are, what they are doing, and to discuss with them in class about emotional states, their causes, their signals, and the way to manage them when they are not pleasant. Moreover, giving to students a regular occasion to stop and think about their feelings, should allow them to better recognize the bodily clues that emotions send and to better understand why we are feeling in some ways.

We are actually in the process of finalizing the APP, which will be available in April and used in class in May. For this reason, even if our abstract will be accepted, we won’t be able to present a final paper by March 24th.

[1] Salovey, P. & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality,9, 185-211.