Social and Emotional Learning and Resilience in Schools: Projects from Europe

During the past years, the European Commission has funded a number of projects aimed at promoting children’s and adults’ social, emotional, and resilience skills. These actions attest a growing attention towards the development of personal and interpersonal abilities that are extremely important to face the new challenges of the current world. This symposium, by presenting some projects implemented throughout Europe, aims at witnessing the attempts made so far to foster the development of these skills in different education systems and suggests original methods, activities, and tools that may be embedded into the current educational policies. The symposium embraces contributions that explore the topics of social and emotional learning, resilience, and school inclusion addressed to both universal level and targeted level, such as children from disadvantaged backgrounds and with special needs. The first contribution describes Learning to Be, a recently funded project aimed to develop and to test a set of tools and methods that would help teachers, as well as 4th and 8th grades students, assess the social, emotional, and health-related skills. The second contribution describes EBE-EUSMOSI, a project that has provided 4th and 5th grades pupils and their teachers with a social, emotional, and prosocial curriculum aimed at supporting school inclusion. The third project is RESCUR Surfing the Waves, which illustrates a resilience curriculum implemented by teachers with the collaboration of parents and is addressed to early years and primary school children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Last but not least, the fourth contribution, PSI_WELL, offers a further example of intervention facilitating social inclusion and wellbeing, this time targeting families with children with special needs.