In recent decades, there has been a growing investment in research to design and implement programmes aimed at promoting socioemotional skills at school according to the framework of social and emotional learning (SEL). Recent literature recommends designing SEL programmes with a rigorous theoretical foundation and carefully evaluating their effectiveness to contribute to the continuous improvement of educational and teaching practices.

This contribution responds to these recommendations by proposing the use of metaphors as an innovative tool proven effective for promoting social–emotional learning at school. The use of metaphors is central to the Nous Project, developed by the Education and Didactics Research Centre (CRED) of the University of Verona and aimed at promoting emotional self-understanding in primary and middle school students. Metaphor was proposed as a model to facilitate the analysis of one’s emotional experience, supporting the recognition and understanding of one’s emotions. Based on the cognitive conception of emotions and the ancient philosophy of care, the project follows the educative research approach: it offers high-quality educational experiences to students while evaluating their effectiveness through qualitative research. In light of the literature on the educational value of metaphor, the epistemological function of this tool will be highlighted: it fosters the creative potential of thought, expands the possibilities of giving meaning to experience, allowing us to grasp a reality that rational logic cannot always understand. Following Zambrano’s philosophy, metaphor is prior to thought itself, and precisely because it escapes rationalist and scientistic thought, which tends to dominate today, it becomes particularly valuable for responding to the socioemotional needs currently emerging in the educational and scholastic fields.

For the primary school project, we proposed the metaphor ‘the garden of emotions’, which associates emotional experiences with plants, to suggest a similarity between the structure of an emotion and that of a plant. During the proposed educational programme, the children were invited to associate their emotional experience with a plant and to analyse it by drawing the plant and describing:
1) within the ground from which the plant grows, the fact from which the emotion arises
2) within the fruits of the plant, the manifestations produced by the emotion and
3) within the stem of the plant where the nourishing sap flows, the thoughts which nourish the emotion.

Regarding the programme designed for middle school, the metaphor ‘the geometry of emotions’ was created, starting from the assumption that geometry shapes the world, just as our emotions shape our emotional lives. The students were invited to analyse their own emotional experiences by drawing geometric shapes that they considered suitable for illustrating their particular experiences according to the principles of the model proposed in primary school.

Examples and data emerging from the research on the effectiveness of metaphorical tools will be presented, arguing for their impact on increasing emotional self-understanding.

This contribution is relevant because it presents an innovative project that uses original metaphors designed to foster emotional self-understanding skills and offers teachers proven-effective tools to improve SEL practices.

Keywords: Social and emotional learning, emotional self-understanding, metaphor, Nous project, primary school, middle school, educative research.