SOCIO-EMOTIONAL EDUCATION, TEACHING AND INTEGRAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The article examines the relevance of socioemotional education in teaching practice, focusing on the relationships established in school settings and within the prison system. Based on a bibliographic review in databases such as Periódicos CAPES, SciELO and Google Scholar, it selects studies that discuss theoretical foundations, implementation experiences and the documented impacts of socioemotional education in different institutional contexts. The guiding question asks to what extent socioemotional education contributes to the integral development of individuals and to the qualification of teaching work. The reviewed studies converge in showing that fostering competences such as self-knowledge, self-regulation, empathy, cooperation and responsible decision-making has positive effects on student engagement, school climate, interpersonal coexistence and mental health. At the same time, they highlight important limitations, including insufficient teacher education, the tendency to psychologise structurally produced problems and the risk that socioemotional education may be captured by behavioural control agendas, especially in highly vulnerable contexts such as prisons. The analysis argues that socioemotional education does have real formative potential, but that its emancipatory strength depends on how it is articulated with pedagogical projects committed to human rights, social justice and to transforming the conditions that produce suffering and exclusion both in schools and in the prison system.