Adeje celebrated the inauguration of the 29th Adeje Summer University today with the inaugural address given by the expert in pedagogy and psychopedagogy, Mar Romera, who is also president of the Francesco Tonucci Pedagogical Association. Her talk centered on emotions and happiness.
Adeje mayor Jose Miguel Rodriguez Fraga opened proceedings, stating that the council was “particularly delighted to welcome everyone back after a two year pause in university activities”. He spoke of the importance of education and bringing it nearer to the people, given that for a while in parts of the island, as tourism and construction grew, many young people moved away from the notion of further education and straight into the workforce without adequate training or preparation. That’s why, he added, the presence of the summer university in Adeje had to be a constant.
The mayor also thanked the private companies who supported the university, always in conjunction with the University of La Laguna (ULL), and said now was when we could work together to make up for lost time.
The ULL rector, Rosa Aguilar, said that in times of crisis politics and the world of education needed to seek solutions. We are in, she said, “a period when some bodies seek to sow seeds of doubt in both education and institutions.” Adeje, she said, was a good example of what training and education could do for people directly, not just in terms of finding a good job, but “in personal development, becoming people who are aware of their environment, their society”.
Emotional intelligence
The key to success is evolution, change, and that starts in the person not externally – this was the message from Mar Romera in her inaugural address. “Change comes from within, from our brains. We may think that the good and right things that happen to us are from outside but that is not so”.
She continued, “our vision conditions our behaviour, which is why, when we face up to a problem we have to see from which point of view we are doing so…check our motives, look in the mirror and remember who we are. We can’t say one thing, feel another and do something completely different”.
Uncertainty is an emotional state which relies on fear, which in turn paralyses our actions. “Emotional intelligence needs training, like the muscles, we can’t work to keep our kids happy and safe and then expect them to adapt to critical situations”, Romera continued, “which is why I believe we have to learn to face sadness, guilt, or fear”.
