Donald et. al.
2022
Metaanalysis which demonstrates that self-determination is correlated with pro-social behavior.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a popular phenomenon in schools, even while it is caught in debates over who (teachers, parents, program developers?) is responsible for defining and delivering the scaffolding for an ‘emotionally healthy’ or ‘socially competent’ person. This article shares takeaway themes from a critical discourse community conducted with six elementary educators in the northwest United States. The goal was to discuss SEL in ways that pay close attention to the habits of thinking, speaking, and feeling that often go unnamed and unquestioned in everyday conversation. Members of the discourse community spanned across a range of positionalities: long-time second-grade classroom teacher, first-year kindergarten teacher, SEL specialist, Special Education director, SEL-focused paraprofessional. From where I stand as a former teacher educator and current teacher/researcher at the university level, these teachers’ perspectives could catalyze deeper thought and action toward community-focused SEL in a time when divisions run deep.
One question I posed to teachers at the end of the discourse community was how their thoughts and feelings about SEL had changed during our discussions. The teachers’ answers demonstrated a willingness to embrace ambiguity even when it is uncomfortable, to think critically about curricular practices, and to have vulnerable conversations with students.
Some of the teachers felt encouraged to nurture a habit of questioning, which could include critically examining curricula and/or self-reflecting on their own ingrained identities. Eunice said she was prompted to think more deeply about “the why” behind certain behaviors and lessons. The discourse community helped her “focus on building rapport and relationships with kids and their families, and getting to know the bigger story … I feel like it opened up my eyes to kind of look at things more critically, in a good sense.” Joon Lee said her thinking and feeling changed “very much” from the discourse community, echoing Eunice to state the importance of asking “why” we do the things we do:
I have never questioned why we do it or how we do it … I struggled to teach [a particular SEL program] because I don’t do well with scripted things. … so now I kind of question it more. And think about the pros and cons of each. And the “why” I’m doing it, and is it benefitting my students and you know, how do I need to adjust things if they’re not working? And I think just that whole philosophy of questioning not just SEL but other things that you’re doing in your classroom. And the idea that we blame students for their lack of whatever, rather than questioning what we’re doing and changing what we’re doing.
Similarly to Joon Lee, Elphaba Marie shared that she felt more equipped to question curriculum:
I mean, before, I was just right on board and not really questioning that gut feeling of whether it was ok to question it. And now it’s like, ok, well maybe it is ok to say, “Hey, I’m not going to teach this method to my students. Maybe I’m gonna do something different. And maybe I don’t want to use this curriculum with them...just because the school district says I have to. It might not fit their needs.” And I can advocate for them, I think, a little more effectively now. Because I think now I have some solid reasons to verbalize and advocate for them.
Elphaba Marie contrasted the way she used to feel about questioning with how she felt after our community meetings:
And you start questioning [SEL programs]. And then you feel like you’re going against everything that you’re supposed to be thinking and you’re supposed to be doing as a teacher. It kind of makes you feel bad. Like that’s just not what you’re supposed to do. So it was kind of refreshing, and a little bit freeing, I guess, to say, “Hey, you know what? It’s ok, it’s expected that you should question these things. It’s good that we’re looking out for our kids’ self-interest, or our kids’ interest, and being their voice.”
Another change the teachers described in their thinking and feeling around SEL was an openness to invite emotional experiences in the moment. Cindy discussed how she could avoid becoming “formulaic” when engaging with SEL. She described feeling less “bound” by a prepared lesson and instead “taking other opportunities to just like, ‘wait a minute, let’s stop and talk about what’s going on, like right now’ … more open conversation about things as a class.”
I think I was worried about putting people on the spot before now. Like if you could see somebody was upset, just kind of letting them have their space. And you know, talking to them privately. But now I think I’m more, just, if someone is clearly sobbing on the rug during Morning Meeting, just kind of calling it out. And you know, clearly if the student didn’t want to share, I would just kind of move on. But it has allowed for some conversations to happen.
At the same time, Cindy shared how “There’s a lot of those moments.”
… it can feel overwhelming. It’s like, oh my gosh, all we’re doing is moving from one—it feels like one tragic situation to another, for these students. I mean, they’re not always truly tragic situations, but you know, in the moment, that’s what the student is experiencing.
Cindy indicates a sense of overwhelm and overload, demonstrating the complicated emotions (connection, support, and overwhelm) involved in creating space for vulnerable sharing. The importance and difficulty of welcoming emotional expression was voiced by others too. Elphaba Marie shared the following takeaway:
Just really look at what you’re teaching the kids. And it is ok to have feelings. Strong feelings, whether they’re good, happy, sad, angry, whatever they are, it’s ok to feel those feelings. We don’t have to damper them for the sake of other people. … And so I wish that, you know, my co-workers would understand that a lot of times, when they send me angry kids because they’re just grumpy in the classroom.
Learning from these perspectives, we should consider teachers’ willingness to lean into “negative” emotion without undermining the emotional vulnerability and boundaries that may exist simultaneously. We can encourage teachers to embrace self-reflection and relational openness, becoming more comfortable with the discomfort of making space for others’ difficult emotions or acknowledging misalignment with a curricular expectation, but we must recognize the need for systems and structures that truly support teachers in this work. Critical questioning and emotional conversations are hugely important, but they alone will not solve deep-seated issues of curricular rigidity, educational overwhelm, compassion fatigue, and trauma induced by systemic oppression. If teachers are advocating for students, who is advocating for teachers?
Great transformation is needed from systems of power and privilege, not just from teachers.
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One of the final questions the teachers and I discussed during our time together was what SEL should or could be called. SEL has become much more visible and supported in the past ten years, by educators as well as families. Simultaneously, SEL has come under intense criticism, particularly from politically conservative community organizations that refer to it as a form of liberal indoctrination. Negative, politically-charged associations with the term “SEL” have led some to suggest using the phrase “life skills” instead, which is preferred by parents of all political affiliations according to a survey from the Fordham Institute. However, a 2022 poll from the Committee for Children shows “no significant top-of-mind associations with SEL” among US parents as a general group, despite small pockets of negative perceptions. Data from this survey also indicate that parental support for SEL persists regardless of whether it is referred to as life skills, whole child education, or career readiness.
Others endorse social and emotional learning as a philosophy but are critical of its failure to deeply address systems of oppression, with some authors resisting the term “SEL” altogether for its ties to colonial and capitalistic practices. Teacher educators Patrick Camangian and Stephanie Cariaga propose the term “humanization” instead, and Clio Stearns, while acknowledging the potential “transitional purpose” of SEL, considers how the term itself may close off the social and emotional experiences that occur outside of codified SEL. Robert Jagers, Deborah Rivas-Drake, and Teresa Borowski advocate for “Transformative SEL” that retains the term but adds a social justice-oriented descriptor, and Zoë Higheagle Strong and I have written about the potential for “Social and Emotional Learning for Social and Emotional Justice,” or SEL-SEJ.
A key theme from teachers was the realization that language has an incredible impact on our realities, but to not get overly attached to any particular term or label because language can also become confining and restrictive. In the discourse community, I shared Stearns’ differentiation between SEL, the acronymized curricular phenomenon, and social and emotional learning, the concept of “any learning (with or without explicit teaching) about the self, interactions with others, internal experiences, feelings, and what it means to share space, time, and resources with others” (as she writes on page 1 of her book).
Although the current buzzword of SEL can certainly be helpful in fostering a sense of familiarity and buy-in with broader ideas of social and emotional aspects of being, it can also become so packaged and limited that it shuts down recognition of the social and emotional happenings that exist outside of traditional curricula. The following comment from Elphaba Marie highlights how giving language to something may help it be explicitly discussed and materialized, and also how those materializations may resist the constrictions of the language that helped create them. She speaks as a Special Educator:
I mean, at least for me, like I have to explicitly teach those skills. And they have to be called something, categorized. I mean, I don’t care what they’re called but I have to teach those skills. … But for each of my students, it’s not just teaching Second Step or teaching the class that they’re not allowed to have feelings. It’s highly individualized. So it’s a little bit different than like an SEL program. So I think in that way, it’s kind of different. I don’t know. It’s not like a running program.
Without the explicit emphasis on SEL, would the need for these skills, particularly for students with disabilities, lose a sense of legitimacy and support? Just as SEL may protect and validate the need for attending to students’ social and emotional lives, it must also remain malleable enough to be individualized and reimagined.
Cindy and Joon Lee both spoke to how language changes over time, shaping our realities without cementing them in place: “I think words have a lot more impact than we ever realize,” said Cindy.
They’re just, they’re surrounding us and then you get used to them and then you have no idea what their origin is. And then, you know, and then you come to realize, ‘Oh no, that’s a terrible way to think about it.’ But it’s so hard to change, right? And so hard to separate from that.
These ideas underscore the importance of exploring our language so that we might recognize its changeability and our own agency in that process. While Cindy’s comment illuminates the great power entangled with words, Joon Lee pointed out the importance of not treating language as a be-all, end-all phenomenon:
I thought, “Oh, and then that can get analyzed 20 years from now as being the wrong thing to do.” … Sometimes you just have to laugh at how language seems to be the, like the most important thing. How we say some things and does, is that really the most important thing, does that matter? Is that always going to—what's okay and what's not okay, or what's the right way to do it—is that going to change and continue to change?
In this instance, Joon Lee was referring to the discourses around “classroom norms” versus “classroom rules,” and how “norms” has been more recently taken up as the more appropriate (and less controlling) term to use. Joon Lee said she realized how the word “norms,” however, can carry an underlying ableist differentiation between “normal vs. abnormal.” Her comment expresses the tension between deeply analyzing our language without becoming immobilized. As Cindy said, “We have to have words, right? We have to talk.” The link Joon Lee draws between “analyzed” and “wrong” suggests an association of critical analysis with moral judgment, in which language is examined to the point of new prescriptive imperatives. Does a particular term matter, and how so? What is going to be judged as “right” versus “wrong” by others?
Joon Lee’s comment holds implications for critically-oriented scholars and practitioners who engage with teachers. When habits of analyzing discourse are enacted in top-down ways, with teachers positioned as those who are “studied,” exasperation and defensiveness are likely to arise. Furthermore, if teachers feel as though critically examining their own discursive patterns is a practice of moral judgment, absolutist determinations, and policing of language, they may be less inclined to engage with the power and changeability of language. Metaphorically, one approach is to treat language and discourse as lily-pads in the pool of our realities.
Examining the etymology, cultural underpinnings, or expectations of a particular word (or lily-pad) may lead us to deem that word problematic, wrong, or outdated. For instance, classroom rules might become replaced by classroom norms in a tireless endeavor to hop from pad to pad, seeking the “right” language on which to settle. However, another approach is to understand critical questioning as the act of swimming itself. Perhaps there is no absolute correctness or permanent connotation of a word, only an immediate commitment to understand the ripples it creates in a given reality and the motions that might give way to more socially-just waves of being.
While it is important to recognize the order-and-control connotations behind the word “rule” or the ableist assumptions that can manifest in “norms,” and to remove some words entirely when their histories are loaded with racist, ableist, or other oppressive functions, words can still be explored with humility and curiosity. Rather than concluding that the term SEL is bad or wrong, waiting to be replaced by something new and better, we might frame SEL as something that creates real and tangible—but also contextual and changeable—impacts. Along these lines, Cindy later responded to the question of what to call SEL, resting any specific answer but rather seeking balance and fluidity:
I don’t really know how to say it, but it’s like shifting the lens … you know, SEL isn’t there to fix the “crisis” of emotional deficit, but we’re going to give more time in our day to recognize emotion and create space for all emotion and…yeah. Maybe we’ll label it and talk about it, but we’re also just gonna listen and let things unfold.
Two takeaways shine brightly from the discourse community as a whole: the importance of relationships and the importance of questioning.
“The relationship and the communication and the compassion needs to be more important than the curriculum.” - Eunice
“Just the questioning of what we’re doing, or the questioning of…I guess the big picture of what education, what a classroom environment should look like…and sound like…you know, all of those things.” - Joon Lee
These takeaways threaded their way through our discussions on responding to positive and negative emotion, setting limits on behaviors, and navigating the dynamics between curricular accountability and free-for-all choice. The importance of building relationships was accompanied by a wish for a greater sense of community and communication within educational settings. With the practice of questioning, teachers demonstrated their willingness to allow for discomfort, differences, and uncertainty. However time remains a barrier for both of these desires. Joon Lee expressed the need to question “all the time we put into social and emotional learning, that’s maybe taken away from some of the other, you know, things.” She continued:
I just wish we had more time to talk as teachers to each other about various things. But there isn’t the time built into our system. It’s just go-go-go-go-go all the time. And I think we’d benefit a lot.
Joon Lee’s request is not for more “SEL time,” but for more time to simply “talk as teachers,” to question, and to consider what other things might be shrouded beneath the banner of ordained curricula. Cindy added:
Again, it comes back to the relationship. And time. And you know, I don’t have a relationship with the support staff, but I need to fill them in on the student in the next 12 seconds … Like there’s these things happening that are probably quite important, but are all the adults coming back together to share? No, you know. We’re not.
From the position of a Special Education teacher and director, Elphaba Marie also voiced the need for more time to spend with teachers and contextualize curriculum toward students’ diverse learning needs: “I ask my principal all the time: ‘Can I have time with the teachers to show them how to differentiate these lessons?’ He’s like, ‘No, we don’t have time for that.’”
To promote approaches to SEL that are not overly scripted and surveilled, or presented to teachers in prepackaged form as an “everyone for themselves” range of options, there are balances to consider and relationships to foster. If teachers do not have the time and support to navigate these considerations as a community, unquestioned top-down practices are likely to remain seen as the only viable options for meeting accountability benchmarks and dominant definitions of “success,” in and beyond SEL.
