The contemporary environmental crisis calls for rethinking higher education in order to incorporate environmental socio-emotional skills. Embodied learning integrates emotional education, sustainability, and bodily experience to foster responsible environmental attitudes and behaviors. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a bodily dynamics program—based on conscious movement, motor cooperation, and experiential reflection—on the development of environmental socio-emotional competencies, including emotional self-regulation, ecological empathy, environmental awareness, and disposition toward pro-environmental behaviors. A quantitative quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design was applied with 48 university students from Quito. The intervention group participated in an eight-session bodily dynamics program, using validated instruments to assess socio-emotional competencies, emotion regulation, and connectedness to nature. Statistically significant improvements were observed in socio-emotional competencies, adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and connectedness to nature in the intervention group, with moderate effect sizes, while the comparison group showed no relevant changes. The study supports bodily dynamics as a relevant educational strategy in higher education, strengthening environmental education through an integrated emotional, embodied, and experiential learning perspective.
GUANOTASIG et al. (Thu,) studied this question.