Fostering the development of social and emotional competencies through expressive production

Abstract

This chapter focuses on fostering the development of social and emotional learning competencies through learning based on expressive production. Expressive production (or personal expression) provides opportunities to practise and further develop social and emotional skills. To understand this relationship between social and emotional learning and expressive production the chapter presents the main theoretical principles of expressive creative activities. The chapter also explains so-called expressive experimentation and two specific examples of facilitating expression (working with clay, an object) are presented demonstrating the application of expressive experimentation for the development of the social and emotional competencies of university students within the course of introductory psychology. Based on the theory of expression, the chapter tries to inspire the use of expressive techniques in teaching.