EMOTIONAL EDUCATION AS A CROSS CURRICULAR SUBJECT IN SECONDARY SCHOOL: DIDACTIC APPROACHES BASED IN CONFLUENT EDUCATION AND ENHANCED BY GAMIFICATION AND TECHNOLOGY

"Emotions can be driving force or obstacle for learning. But learning happens, for sure, around them." Mora Teruel, F. Recent education laws (LOGSE, LOE, LOMCE) have favored the use of active methodologies such as project based learning, gamification or flipped classroom, promoted the development of diverse life competencies and different types of intelligence, and, simultaneously, asked for the Adjustment to assessable learning standards. However authors of these laws were not the first to be aware of the importance of those elements; along history, the teaching collective has always been one of the most vocational and active in providing meaningful content to its performance. Since the Great Didactic of Comenius, personalities, movements and trends have repeatedly remarked the capacity of public education to awaken responsibility and inspire personal growth and development, and, thus, the great importance of designing curriculums which integrate all fundamental human being dimensions. The first stage of present project was to investigate on the potential of Confluent Education as a tool for deep and effective pedagogic innovation, pointing out the value of historical humanistic approaches to address current issues in teaching-learning processes. Confluent Education is a trend that come out during the late 60s, based on Gestalt Psychology principles, and served for the creation of a training program at the University of California Saint Barbara, which run far more than 25 years. In Confluent Education, emotions, relations and bonds are taken as the base for development of teachers and learners, and for the significant learning. It extends the knowledge transfer to the affective sphere, not as a separated subject, but as a different way of understanding cognition. In the second stage of the study, proposals of didactic intervention within the subjects of "Physical Education" and "Physic and Chemistry", based on the analysis of this pedagogical trend, enriched and complemented by modern technologies applied to knowledge, and by the methodology of gamification, have been elaborated by a specifically trained team of professionals of the education field. These proposals include and relate assessable learning standards, key competencies (UE), different types of intelligence and defined gestaltic aims. During the next stage, a pilot group of teachers are being instructed on how to take the elaborated proposals into daily practice of their classrooms and collecting data for a deep and empirical assessment.