Presentation issue 16º

The journal Advances in Educational Supervision has decided, with this monographic issue, to address a complex and immanent subject to human beings: emotions and their relationship with education. It is true that throughout history our affective and emotional part has had a negative look because of its close connection with the subjective. Western culture, since the Renaissance, has been built on reason. But it is no less so than for several decades - perhaps Nietzsche could be a turning point -, first in a timid way and today in an open way, emotions have become an object of analysis of neuroscience, of the Humanities as a whole and education. Today knowledge about the brain helps us to build education, but also to better understand the basic elements of behavior such as fear, cruelty, desire, anger, pain, love, etc. From these advances education not only considers what emotions to transmit, but also how to apply the knowledge of neuroscience in the processes of learning and development of childhood and adolescence.

The article by Ignacio Morgado, Professor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Barcelona, ​​aims to serve as a central framework to enhance the importance of the topic, since it combines brain research with its application to teaching. In his article Scientific cues for quality teaching, he will show us how we are acquiring new neural representations of knowledge that reinforce existing ones and improve learning, which is very important in the daily practice of teaching. Learning, he will tell us, is to establish the conditions that activate the brain mechanisms, hence its inescapable consideration in learning a foreign language or any other subject. But each learning has its prerequisites, so it is not the same to learn a foreign language than mathematics, but all learning, we will say, must activate the cognitive structure, regardless of the methodology used. The value of repetition as a mechanism of stability of learning, of the early childhood age crucial moment to acquire a language or the need to create multiple and flexible neuronal connections when we learn a scientific discipline, are moments considered by the author in a language clear and simple. The lesson that leaves us: the discoveries of neuroscience improve the teaching system and, with it, learning.

Kira Mahamud, professor at the National University of Distance Education, takes a tour through the history of research on emotions and feelings in her work Emotions and feelings: historical and multidisciplinary coordinates of a key field of study for education sciences . Kira Mahamud presents the personalities that throughout history have dealt with emotions, which serves to question the novelty of the theme and highlight the historical continuity in the construction of knowledge around emotions. An essential construction in the aims of education and with significant implications in society. We are before an approach to the state of the question through the diachronic path that the author offers us about the origin and development of research on emotions. A magnificent walk through the contemporary theoretical body of emotions.

Lorenzo Morlan, neurologist and Head of Unit at the Hospital de Getafe, enters us through the mystery of the brain, that mass they say is gelatinous, gray in color, of great complexity and that, with its clarity of exposition, helps us to understand . His work, entitled Emotional Brain. Concept of history, location and function, allows us to understand how the brain, through a series of neuronal mechanisms, elaborates emotional energy, provokes our reactions to pleasure and danger. In an accessible language, it explains how the brain codes the functions of pleasure, fear, pain, in a word, emotions. Complementary article to the rest of those that make up this monograph, being dedicated to draw the map of the emotional brain, its essential elements and how they work through what the author calls neuroanatomy notes and exemplifies with the use of some experiments accompanied by explanations about the cerebral cortex, genes, hormones, emotion and moral behavior. After reading we can conclude that the neuronal wiring has a lot to do with our learning and social relationships, hence the interest of this work, as well as, with illustrations, to explain the puzzle of the emotional brain.

Rafael Bisquerra and Núria Pérez, authors of the article Emotional Education: Strategies for its implementation, put at our disposal a practical guide of great benefit for teachers. Not only do they illustrate us about the concept of emotional education, its importance and necessity, but they also introduce us to a new competence, emotional competence, with its consequent breakdown of strategies to be put into practice in the classroom. They present us with a whole collection of activities with examples of great benefit in the classroom. With the activity Good morning, how do you feel? They teach us to facilitate the expression of the feelings and emotions of children through verbal and corporal language. With the wheel of feelings we are taught to recognize and identify feelings through happiness, sadness, disappointment or worry. Turn the game or arrow roulette and in the place where it stops is another strategy that serves to explain to the rest of the comrades that that feeling consists of, through an example that he himself has lived. With these exercises, or others such as constructive complaining and irrational beliefs, the authors teach us how to use emotional competence to maintain better relationships among everyone, and not only in school, but also at work, in social networks , etc. In short, in life.

Finally, Mayca Pérez Asensio, expert in emotional education, presents the contributions of the PNL (neurolinguistic programming) to emotional education. And is that NLP is a set of techniques and skills that improve our interpersonal communications, we expand the perspective of us, which helps us personal growth, with its deep impact on learning. On the scientific basis of what we know about the brain, Mayca Pérez helps us discover our map of reality, of our representations -images, sounds, sensations, memories, stimuli, etc.- on which NLP is anchored in the classroom, allowing the expression of emotions and the action linked to them. A useful tool that, as the author says, should be part of the initial and ongoing teacher training.

The subject, obviously, is much broader. Independently of certain aspects that the reader may have missed, we believe that all the articles that constitute the monograph represent a broad spectrum of the subject, enough to enrich our training and, from them, to deepen the knowledge of how the brain and in the reconstruction of the ways in which our emotions crystallize in the classroom and remain fixed in the sciences and in art in general. All articles open paths of knowledge, therefore, all its authors, we appreciate your cooperation.