Education and schools face a range of complex issues coming to the fore in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Among the most prominent and indicative challenges is the undermining of the rights and needs of children: from social exclusion and widespread bullying, lack of sense of belonging, acute stress and mental health issues – exacerbated by a global pandemic – to the stakes of digitalisation and the limits of so-called traditional pedagogical approaches. While much is known about the prevalence of these issues and ways to tackle them, pieces of research remain disjoint, and data are fragmented. Socio-emotional and ethical learning can be presented as a solution, but systematic and comprehensive ways of developing such skills must still be established.These psycho-educational and socio-legal problems attract attention from the research community and robust knowledge has been produced, supporting meaningful actions in the field. However, data remain disjoint and solutions are only sometimes replicable or implementable on a large scale.
There is a need for conceptual, methodological, and digital innovation in the face of complexity. Interdisciplinary approaches are required to question current theoretical understanding and analysis models, transform them and develop scalable interventions. Integrating knowledge around the complex realities of children, teachers, school management staff and families can open up new lines for research and lead to developing solid and impactful responses. This interdisciplinary collaborative research project’s goal is twofold: a) to produce a novel integrative theoretical and empirical approach to study children’s basic psychological needs and fundamental rights in schools in the digital age; b) to co-develop empirically based and scalable socio-emotional and ethical blended learning interventions for all the school actors, to support needs-meeting and rights-respecting school environments in a virtuous cycle of improvement.
An innovative theoretical and integrative model combining children’s needs, rights and the school climate frames this project. Moreover, it is organised along three interconnected and operational dimensions, characteristic of research addressing societal issues and thus essential to conduct breakthrough research:
- understanding;
- integrating knowledge;
- intervention-transformation.
This interdisciplinary project combines theoretical frameworks, concepts and tools from developmental psychology, children’s rights studies, education sciences, prevention and health promotion science, computer science, more specifically human-computer interaction and digital learning science. It is also built along participatory intervention research principles, including mixed and multi-actor (children; teachers; school staff; families) methodological approaches. Four interventions to support socio-emotional and ethical blended learning (including digital tools) will be co-created with stakeholders. Their individual and collective effects will be measured with an integrative assessment toolset and triangulation of qualitative methods. A team-based approach to open-ended problems also requires a transdisciplinary perspective that includes stakeholders’ perspectives throughout the research process. Such approaches are crucial to improving the accuracy of the framing of problems as well as generating innovative and public-sensitive methods and novel knowledge.