Metrô ENLACE | Centro Universitário FACENS

 

DEVELOPING SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL CAPABILITIES, COMPETENCIES, AND SKILLS IN A HIGHER ED CONTEXT

Role: Lead Learning Designer | Project: Centro Universitário FACENS (Sorocaba, Brazil) (2019-current)

Team: Mayza Mazzon, Raquel Barros, Ricardo Dutra & Thais Felix (graphic design).

ENLACE is a transdisciplinary learning lab at FACENS, one of Sorocaba's main universities. The lab focuses on designing and offering learning experiences to students around the development of social-emotional skills. These skills are needed as a response to pressing local, national and global challenges. To design these experiences, we work with teachers and students across the entire university, adapting learning paths to every semester of their undergraduate journeys. A main outcome of our collaboration has been the development of a learning experience called Metrô ENLACE. The metro is a metaphorical game exercise that takes students through four lines (global vision, entrepreneurial attitude, innovative mind and sustainable consciousness). Every metro line connects students to a different station. In that way, students explore a "city” across three developmental zones: me & myself, me & others, me & the world.

Fig.1: Students start by entering a fictional metro station that invites them to explore the social-emotional infrastructure of this hypothetical city.

Fig.2: The city has three main zones (me & myself, me & others, me & the world), 4 lines, and 15 stations.

 

entering Metrô enlace

Metrô ENLACE works as an online platform, a digital experience that was developed during the COVID pandemic. Currently, we begin to explore a blend of online and in-person experiences that enrich students’ sense of experiential learning and social-emotional development. As they enter the metrô system, they are asked to choose a ticket, which depends on their academic semester. The learning journeys are, hence, tailored to their different academic contexts and moments.

Fig.3: A fictional ticket booth asks students to choose their current semester—based on which, a learning journey through the metrô is pre-defined.