Nélida Zaitegi highlights the role of the Canary Islands as a pioneer in emotional education in Spain

 

The Canary Islands was the first autonomous community in the entire state to incorporate emotional intelligence into the school curriculum. “All issues related to this issue are worked on in an important way here and this is evident when talking to education professionals on the islands. They are pioneers and we can say that the Canary Islands have an advantage in matters as delicate as the prevention of bullying.” Nélida Zaitegi was in charge of opening the calendar of scientific contents of the I Reeducation Forum; New Challenges, New Paradigms, which will be held starting this Tuesday at Expomeloneras. And she did not hesitate to point out the benefits of Emocrea, the island subject that unites emotional intelligence and creativity and is a benchmark for the entire Spanish educational system. “It helps identify the different types of violence that exist in the school environment” and marks the path towards “positive coexistence”, a model in which, through empathy, respect and collaborative work, values ​​are addressed. such as dignity, equality, mutual respect or the assumption of rights and duties. “The role of education is to train people and we must provide the necessary means so that these people in training can live dignified and meaningful lives.” Good people, points out the teacher (she collaborates voluntarily with students with problems), avoid and confront harassment.

 

When talking about bullying, we must start from a base that, surely, does not fit well with the idea that society as a whole may have about this problem. We are much better than a few years ago. It might seem the opposite, but the reality is that the mere awareness that this problem exists is already an advance that surpasses the vision that has traditionally been had about it. “A few decades ago it was said that this has always happened or that we are facing a phenomenon that is a child's thing; But today it is an important element that is taken into account in schools for the prevention and care of students." Nélida Zaitegi knows very well what she is talking about. She is a retired teacher, today she acts as a school advisor and for many years she served as president of the School Council of Euskadi. And she knows it because she had to deal with one of the first cases of media bullying in the country: the Jokin Case. A terrible event (it caused the suicide of young Jokin Cebeiro after a year of harassment and ridicule by his classmates).

 

 

 

 

Zaitegui pointed out that the first thing to do when addressing this problem is to treat it as “violence between equals” and to do so, the participants must be identified as part of a triangle where there are no victims and aggressors. “Everyone loses here; "It is a lose-lose dynamic that must be abandoned to put the emphasis on the aggressors to prevent this harassment from degenerating into more aggressive and dangerous behavior in the medium and long term." But Zaitegi added to the equation the passive observers who tolerate this harassment without doing anything about it. “This denotes a problem of ethics, empathy and compassion that must be addressed at school.” In this sense, he spoke of a new win-win paradigm in which students “learn to care for each other through the internalization of values ​​such as solidarity, equity, justice and sustainability.” The challenge, the Basque teacher concluded, is to “create citizenship” and that implies “going beyond the dynamic you do it, you pay it because in a situation of harassment all those involved are ours. The idea is to redirect behaviors to recover empathy, compassion and respect for others. Because punishments are not useful for the development of moral values.” Only an education that addresses personal care and care of others as an axis will achieve, according to Zaitegi, “not only to prevent abuse and violence, but also to move towards personal and collective well-being.”