Conference Program

The global crises and educational emergencies of recent decades have fostered new awareness and generated innovative lines of research and action, initiating a productive dialogue between researchers and professionals across multiple levels. This dialogue aligns with the paradigm of complexity and with the conceptualization of educational communities as ecosystems. Although schools are increasingly engaged in experimentation and innovation, their initiatives are not always coherent or clearly oriented and grounded in robust and shared scientific frameworks, thereby generating the risk of fragmentation and conceptual ambiguity.

A paradigmatic example is the renewed emphasis on the emotional, affective, and relational dimensions as central to quality learning and to individual and contextual well-being within a co-development perspective. Contemporary health models (World Health Organization, 2001), together with advances in neuroscience, have confirmed longstanding insights from experienced educators and philosophical, psychodynamic, and pedagogical traditions regarding their importance. At the institutional level, such dimensions have been variously codified within educational frameworks as essential “competencies” or “skills” for students and, to a lesser and less coherent extent, for teachers.

These are broad and heterogeneously defined constructs that encompass complex, multifactorial dimensions and processes for which traditional scientific models often prove insufficient.

Balconi (2024), in line with Martha Nussbaum’s philosophical perspective (2001), defines emotions as a “value-based state,” understood as a system that cognitively interprets and explains the relationship between the self and the world. This value-based and rational system is grounded in an implicit biophysical, bodily substrate that substantiates it and cannot be overlooked in light of its evolutionary and educational implications, in line with the principles of Embodied Education (Damiani & Gomez Paloma, 2018; 2025).

This abstract therefore aims to present the theoretical framework and initial applications of a transdisciplinary approach to the understanding and development of emotional-relational competencies. The approach is grounded in Embodied Cognition models and integrates contributions from neurobiology and physics. It has been preliminarily implemented at the Laboratory for Research and Development of Teachers’ Emotional-Relational Competences (LAB-CERD) at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

A distinctive feature of LAB-CERD is its focus on teachers, which provides an opportunity for critical reflection on emotional, social, and relational dimensions—considering their limitations, risks, and potential—beginning with persistent definitional challenges. As noted by Scheirlinckx et al. (2023, p. 3), “There has been broad interest from different fields, such as education, psychology, pedagogy, and labor economics, in constructs associated with Social Emotional Skills (SEMS) of teachers. Despite this interest, no clear consensus exists regarding the definition of teacher SEMS and the core skill constructs this domain should encompass.”

More specifically, our framework is informed by the Extended Mind perspective (Clark, 2008) for teacher training and professional development. It seeks to enhance recognition of the teacher’s role as an “epigenetic environmental factor,” conceptualized as a regulator of the educational biophysical field through embodied emotional processes. The paper concludes by outlining the Laboratory’s initial training initiatives, which are structured around the operationalization of transdisciplinary principles and constructs such as the educational field, group synchronization, and consciousness.