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CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, AND PEDAGOGY article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 14 - 2023 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1197193
This article is part of the Research Topic The Case of Social Emotional Learning: Evidence-Based Practices View all 17 articles

The impact of adolescents' voice through an online school radio: a socio-emotional learning experimental project

Provisionally accepted
Patrícia Sarmento Patrícia Sarmento 1,2*Mafalda Lobo Mafalda Lobo 2Kalpna Kirtikumar Kalpna Kirtikumar 2
  • 1 Other, Cascais, Portugal
  • 2 Cooperative Semear Valores, Cascais, Portugal

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Universal school-based socio-emotional learning (SEL) programs for adolescents have shown their efficacy in producing positive outcomes. The aim of the current study is to present an original school-based program and project for adolescents - Semear Valores On-air – and to assess the relationship between participation in the project and students’ socio-emotional skills. Based on the character strengths and virtues model, this online school radio project aimed at promoting communication, creative thinking, adaptability, and resilience skills in adolescents and giving them the opportunity to become influential agents of well-being and citizenship. As part of the school curriculum, students were invited to create and record radio shows and podcasts. An online school radio was thus created, and it continues to broadcast all over the world, with music, daily shows, and interviews 24/7. It was developed within the framework of the Gulbenkian Academies for Knowledge, a nationwide Portuguese program, that seeks to prepare children and youth for change, to enable them to deal with complex problems, and to expand their opportunities for achievement. A quasi-experimental design, with a mixed qualitative-quantitative approach was used to analyze data collected from 112 adolescents in the second year of its implementation, in 2020-2021. Results suggest that 1) teachers’ perceptions of student’s socio-emotional skills in the post test showed more positive associations with the participation in the project, than participant’s perceptions; 2) students identified eight types of lessons learned, the one most referred was the improvement of socio-emotional skills and learning about themselves; and 3) the combined opportunities for adolescents to learn more about themselves, to express themselves and to practice socio-emotional skills are important ingredients for their motivation and active engagement in the project. Overall, these results indicate that participation in the project is associated with positive outcomes for the adolescents and that both monitoring and evaluation data are very important to interpret the outcomes in a more comprehensive manner.

    Keywords: socio-emotional skills, online school radio, Experimental project, adolescents, Virtues and character strengths model, Voice, citizenship

    Received: 30 Mar 2023; Accepted: 29 May 2023.

    Copyright: © 2023 Sarmento, Lobo and Kirtikumar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Patrícia Sarmento, Other, Cascais, Portugal

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.