Blanka Ráhel RósaDoktorand
Om mig
My main research interest circles around the question of how education can act as a facilitator of human flourishing. In my master’s thesis research I identified flourishing to be a three-dimensional concept and established that flourishing cannot be fully realised unless an individual is flourishing from a positive-psychological, a moral-political, as well as from a moral-ethical perspective. There I presented a comprehensive conceptualisation of the skills nurturing human flourishing, generally referred to as social emotional competences in the literature. With regard to their explicit focus on the 21st-century context and contemporary societal challenges, these skills are, however, in scope broader than social emotional competences, hence the term cosmopolitan soft skills instead. The theoretical investigation of flourishing and empirical conceptualisation of cosmopolitan soft skills promoted then a different approach within educational research and policy that, in my understanding, is crucial in order for us to attain not only the economic and environmental but also the social – and so moral and ethical – dimension of global sustainability.
In my current position as a PhD student, I intend to both further develop the ideas put forward in my master’s thesis and narrow the focus by looking at teacher education programmes specifically. Since there is much consensus that socio-emotional-cognitive skills can in fact be taught, modelled, practiced and applied, I believe it’s important to understand how and to what extent students enrolled in teacher education programmes receive (a) information on theories and research on children’s social and emotional development, (b) information on the characteristics and identification of emotional and behavioural disabilities, and (c) knowledge and skills needed to create positive and well-managed learning contexts that promote the developmental, psychological, educational and general health needs of all pupils. My research will therefore explore how international and national initiatives to reframe the concept of quality education and the growing amount of empirical evidence within academia on the far-reaching benefits of social emotional learning have had practical consequences on preservice teacher education in Sweden.
