Petr Slovák

Teaching and Developing Social and Emotional Skills with Technology

Supporting social interactions is a long-term focus for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). However, understanding how social and emotional skills are learned, and how this process can be supported by technology, is an important but underresearched area in HCI so far. To address this gap, we review existing approaches to social and emotions skills learning (SEL) in other fields, with a specific focus on SEL in education, in which a large number of evidence-based programs is widely deployed. In doing so, the primary aim of this article is to provide a foundation and set an agenda for future research on the design of technology that would support, and help teach, social and emotional skills. We identify the key challenges to successful learning shared by SEL programs in education—such as embedding skills learned in class also into everyday situations, promoting reflection, and providing additional opportunities for practice—and outline how these could be addressed by digital technology. Overall, our key argument is that much existing HCI work could be used in support of social and emotional skills learning in education, and possibly other domains, but that the topic has not been explored so far. We also highlight how the focus on supporting SEL would bring novel opportunities and challenges for HCI, as well as provide a basis for a strong HCI research agenda in this space.

Enabling empathy in health and care: design methods and challenges

The role of empathy has come to prominence in HCI as the community increasingly engages with issues in medical, health and emotionally charged contexts. In such settings empathizing with others is crucial in understanding the experience of living with specific conditions, or in being sensitive to the concerns and emotions of potentially vulnerable participants. Researchers in these areas become implicated in designing new tools and technologies that support empathic relations. This workshop therefore aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers and practitioners to share and discuss their work and the challenges they encountered when establishing empathic relationships within health or care contexts. We will work towards developing a richer conceptual and practical understanding of empathic engagement and design methods in this context to support and shape an agenda for future research.

On Becoming a Counsellor: Challenges and Opportunities to Support Interpersonal Skills Training

Well-developed interpersonal skills are crucial for all social interactions. However, understanding how interpersonal skills are taught or learned, and how technology can play a part in this, is yet an under-researched area in CSCW and HCI research. To start addressing this gap, our research explores the learning processes of counselling students, for whom developing interpersonal skills forms a fundamental part of their university education. We followed an iterative process to gain an in-depth understanding of a specific counselling program in the UK, combining interviews and low-fidelity technology prompts. Overall, 26 participants comprising tutors, students and expert counsellors took part. Our findings first provide insights into the highly collaborative and social learning process of the students. We highlight the complexity of interpersonal reflection as a crucial process for developing counselling skills, and identify the challenges to learning that students face. Second, we build on this understanding to draw out empirically grounded design considerations around opportunities for technology innovation in this setting.

Scaffolding the scaffolding: Supporting children's social-emotional learning at home

The development of strong social and emotional skills is central to personal wellbeing. Increasingly, these skills are being taught in schools through well researched curricula. Such social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula are most effective if reinforced by parents, thus transferring the skills into everyday contexts. Traditional SEL programs have however had limited success in engaging parents, and we argue that technology might be able to help bridge this school-home divide. Through interviews with SEL experts we identified central design considerations for technology and SEL content: the reliance on experiential learning and the need to scaffold the parents in scaffolding the interaction for their children. This informed the design of a technology probe comprising a magnet card and online SEL activities, deployed in a school and via Mturk. The results provide a nuanced understanding of how technology-based interventions could bridge the school-home gap in real-world settings and support at-home reinforcement of childrens social-emotional skills.

Developing technology to enhance learning interpersonal skills in counsellor education

ABSTRACT The integration of new technologies into counsellor education has progressed slowly. We present mPath: an online system designed to support iterative, multi-levelled and deep reflection on practice in skills training sessions. We propose the integration of new technologies to counsellor education as an area with scope for future research and development.