Building emotional intelligence and self-esteem in education

1
Building emotional intelligence and self-esteem
in education

• the implications of personalised learning

2
Outline

• emotional dimensions in education
• self-esteem
• emotional intelligence and well-being
• some influences/sources
• personalised learning, personalised public
  services
• therapeutic culture
• some implications
• diminished aspirations?
• empowerment?

3
Emotional dimensions in education

• emotional intelligence self-awareness,
  management of emotions, empathy, expression of
  feelings, recognising the power of feelings
• self-esteem self-worth, confidence, self-concept
• circle time in schools
• personal advisers for young people, personal
  tutorials in colleges
• diagnosis of EI and SE
• new labels vulnerable, fragile learners,
  fragile identities, learners at risk
• research interest identity, biography

4
Some reasons

• personalised public services
• reaching a disaffected public through emotional
  engagement
• concerns about social exclusion and disaffection
  from formal education
• therapeutic culture
• therapeutic interventions in all areas of life
  and public policy
• a mindset, symbols and language that constructs a
  new form of subjectivity
• cultural preoccupation with the diminished self

5
Therapeutic culture

• cultural, social and political beliefs that life
  has become hard to handle
• for some groups
• for everyone were all vulnerable and damaged
• the diminished self...characteristically
  suffers from an emotional deficit and possesses a
  permanent consciousness of vulnerability (Furedi,
  2004 414).
• distinction between legitimate, necessary therapy
  and therapeutic culture/ethos

6
Some implications

• latest evangelical bandwagon or progressive
  development?
• lack of theoretical and empirical evidence for ET
  and SE
• influence of catalytic validity, Hawthorne
  effect, evidence from practice and commercial
  interests
• abandoning educational goals for personal ones
• institutionalising the diminished self
• essentialising particular groups
• dubious and intrusive interventions
• reifying an endless quest to understand and
  accommodate the emotional self
• I feel therefore I am
• I am what my feelings are telling me

7
Challenging the new orthodoxy

• questioning the empirical and theoretical
  evidence
• locating EI and SE in a wider cultural and
  political context
• reinstating structural causes and effects of
  social exclusion and resisting emotional ones
• questioning therapeutic culture
• a culture becomes therapeutic when this form of
  thinking expands from informing the role between
  the individual and therapist to shaping public
  perceptions about a range of issues. At that
  point, it ceases to be a clinical technique and
  becomes an instrument for the management of
  subjectivity (Furedi, 2004, 413-414).
• reasserting the importance of the rational