PEDAGOGY OF EMERGENCY AND VULNERABILITY: TESTING OF A MENTAL SKILL TRAINING PROTOCOL

The proposed research concerns the study areas of Emergency and Vulnerability Pedagogy. In 2020, due to the pandemic, the world’s population was able to experience what it is like to experience an emergency situation and how much it can impact from an educational point of view. There is ample evidence in the literature that such situations can be experienced in a more functional way if one is able to exploit one’s resources in terms of resilience and adaptive responses. Never as in situations like these, resilience and anti-fragile are concepts and resources that assume great importance (Piceci, Cancellara 2020; Taleb 2013). Resilience is a multidimensional structure (Kumpfer 1999; Mariani, Marcolongo, Melchiori, Peluso Cassese 2019) and, observing its various components, the research team has built a Mental Skill Training protocol, borrowing techniques and tools generally applied in sports psychology. The proposed pilot study tested a Mental Skill Training protocol on a group of volunteers made up of 16 university students from the Faculty of Psychology, over a period of 6 weeks. The objective was to test how participation in this protocol could affect self-esteem and sense of self-efficacy, as well as Resilience and Coping Strategies.