“The Nous Project”: A SEL program to promote emotional self-understanding in elementary school children

Abstract

This article presents “The Nous Project,” a SEL program designed to promote and analyze the capacity for emotional self-understanding among children attending elementary schools in Italy. The project rests on the conceptual framework that authentic educational research should be not only explorative of a phenomenon but also transformative of a context and, to achieve this, it should introduce into schools new meaningful experiences and investigate them. The children involved in the project were invited to narrate the emotions they felt during the day in a “diary of emotional life” and analyze them with the help of the metaphor “vegetable garden of emotions.” These reflective exercises were qualitatively analyzed in order to understand what ways of emotional self-understanding emerge from the realized educative experience. At the end of the program, children were asked to write what they thought they had learned, and findings from the qualitative analysis of their answers highlight their perceptions about the effectiveness of the educative experience in which they were involved. Impact Statement: “The Nous Project” is: grounded in a clear theoretical framework, which is represented by the cognitive conception of emotions and the ancient philosophy of care, accordingly to which the purposes of the program are clarified; innovative in terms of design, in particular for the original metaphor “vegetable garden of emotions”, designed to help children to reflect about their emotions; evidence-based, because a qualitative research has been conducted in order to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented educative activities; helpful for practice, because it provides teachers with easily replicable activities, whose effectiveness has been evaluated through a rigorous research process.