Emotional Management: Tool to Fight Social Media Dependency Erasmus Project

Project Title

Emotional Management: Tool to Fight Social Media Dependency

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

The idea of the project has been in our mind for awhile. But only now we, the Youth Association from Transylvania found the right partners to implement our concept from Spain, Portugal and Romania, cooperating on local level with the local government and the school.

The special power of this 2 year- long Strategic Partnership for School Education, is the local and international cooperation of 1-1-1 secondary school, NGO and the local government. We believe the unused potential of the cross-sectoral cooperations, and the involvement of the local authorities help us increase even more the quality work in terms of research and dissemination activities.
In this project we want to tackle the challenges that parents and teachers have to face with in the every days. Due to the high intensity of social media usage among the youngsters false self-images are created in their heads about how they should look like, how they should act, what they should say, and how they should behave with their surroundings. We observe this unreal identity crises at our schools and our local community as well. The deformation of ones self-image easily leads to depression, and bullying.

The innovative solution what this cooperation offers, is to train the teachers and parents how to realize the false images, and its destructive nature. The training focuses on emotional management at the schools as well as at home. We believe that emotional management can be the key to the success of reducing digital bullying, false need to belong, peer pressure, lack of confidence and depression.

Internet studies show that: „Emotions are not consciously controlled. The part of the brain that deals with emotions is the limbic system. It’s thought that this part of the brain evolved fairly early on in human history, making it quite primitive. This explains why an emotional response is often quite straightforward, but very powerful: you want to cry, or run away, or shout. It’s because these responses are based around the need to survive. Emotions are strongly linked to memory and experience. If something bad has previously happened to you, your emotional response to the same stimulus is likely to be strong. Understanding this link to memory and values gives you the key to managing your emotional response. Your emotional responses don’t necessarily have much to do with the current situation, or to reason, but you can overcome them with reason and by being aware of your reactions.”

The implementation of the project will be done in in 3 major phases:.

1) The NGOs with extra support from school psychologist will train the teachers and pedagogics how to recognize the problems of the students, how to use emotional management and treat the issues. During this training, school management will learn how to make the new colleagues adopt the successful method to their daily work. The host of this activity will be the Spanish NGO, as emotional management is their field of expertise.

2) While the training place, the local government does a wide and deeper research on national and international level on the social media dependency, cross reference with the school problems and do a compared study on the participating countries. The baseline of the research is the needs analysis made before applying to this project. After the training, the participants have to share their knowledge with their colleagues and all who participate in the complete project has to implement the learnt methods into their everyday work. This process will be assisted by the NGOs, yet the major leader of the implementation will be the school.
As one of the final intellectual outputs of the project we make a guidebook of the used methodology and the results of its implementation. Thus everyone else who shows interests in such solution could freely access to our results.

The project will be disseminated nationally and internationally as well.

3) The job shadowing events are key elements of the project, as these are the opportunities for the participating teachers to see in action all the methods they learnt during the training. They can experience how their International colleagues use the emotional management tools in the every day work.

As we plan 3 events all in all, everyone has the chance to visit and see how the teachers work in the 2 other participating countries . Also we provide opportunities for better understanding by guest lecturing in the hosting schools.

The results of the observation and the experience will be build in the local knowledge sharing and the dissemination .

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 188530 Eur

Project Coordinator

ASOCIATIA DE TINERI DIN ARDEAL & Country: RO

Project Partners

• ASOCIACION CULTURAL Y MEDIOAMBIENTAL PERMACULTURA CANTABRIA
• AVENTURA MARAO CLUBE
• Escola Secundária de Amarante
• Município de Amarante
• Liceul Teoretic “Orbán Balázs”
• IES LOPE DE VEGA
• Ayuntamiento de Santa Maria de Cayon