Why We Need to Have More Critical Conversations About Social and Emotional Learning
Social and emotional studying (SEL) has picked up steam prior to now few a long time. Recent surveys present widespread help of SEL abilities from parents, teachers and school administrators, and extra curricular packages are being utilized in districts throughout the U.S. At the identical time, a small however adamant group of voices—usually led by politically conservative neighborhood teams—have positioned SEL below assault, turning it right into a controversial idea. While some SEL advocates are fast to refute these criticisms by explaining that SEL shouldn’t be, the truth is, related to a political agenda, others argue that SEL can not and shouldn’t be separated from systemic points deemed political.
Without acknowledging the truth of systemic racism, as an example, some educators argue that SEL can perpetuate a mentality through which social injustices will presumably be solved provided that we are able to “fix” the flawed social and emotional identities of marginalized college students. “Without additionally altering the instructing behaviors, curricula, and faculty insurance policies that may be assaultive to our college students, significantly college students of coloration, incorporating social-emotional studying into instructing won’t be sufficient,” writes Dena Simmons, a previous educator and the founder of LiberatED, a collective that develops school-based resources to address SEL alongside racial justice. Cierra Kaler-Jones, a social justice educator and researcher, agrees, writing that “SEL devoid of culturally-affirming practices is not SEL at all.”
We need to have more critical conversations about SEL. The question is: How can we widen the spectrum of ways it can be critiqued?
As a qualitative researcher and teacher educator in the educational psychology program at Washington State University, I’ve been following the debate and exploring this question of how to broaden critical conversations. To understand this more deeply, I teamed up with a colleague to interview two academic scholars who have been examining SEL through a critical lens via school-based observations and close analysis of literature and curriculum.
Clio Stearns, a researcher, author and assistant professor of education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, who is in multiple classrooms a week working with and observing pre-service teachers, has been asking interesting questions about how SEL is helpful and how it can be inadvertently harmful. Kathleen Hulton, a lecturer in the Sociology department at the University of Massachusetts, brings valuable historical perspectives about the links between emotion and social control.
In our conversation with Stearns and Hulton, the researchers illuminate how it is possible to be deeply committed to fostering students’ (and teachers’) social and emotional humanity and to question particular elements of SEL itself. The interview transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Emma McMain: What led you to research SEL?
Kathleen Hulton: I came to SEL through the lens of having always been really interested sociologically in emotion. One of the first sociology books I ever read was “The Managed Heart,” by Arlie Hochschild. It blew my mind, the idea that corporations or capitalism had an interest in controlling people’s emotions in the service of profit. My kids, at the time, were really small—this was over ten years ago. I started getting this idea that they were learning about their feelings in school, which didn’t happen to me when I was a kid. And it just was kind of the combining of two worlds.
Clio Stearns: The first part of my career was as an elementary school teacher. I got sent to a Responsive Classroom training—my school was a public school in Manhattan and was pouring a ton of money into getting all of us trained. I just remember sitting there through a week of training over the summer and listening to some of the scripted recommendations that they were making. And I felt really offended as a teacher, and affronted by the ways that my interactions with children were … the scripts that were being suggested.
Both of you have brought up points of conflict with SEL. What are your primary concerns?
Stearns: I have several concerns about SEL. I think by and large, it puts the locus of control over reactions to circumstance in the hands and minds of individual children, rather than addressing underlying social injustices. So, for example, one of the stories from my research had to do with a teacher teaching a Second Step lesson … about what you do when you feel sad, and it’s a scripted program. The upshot was, “When we feel sad, there are things we can do about it, like we can take deep breaths. We can focus on talking to somebody that we care about”—things like this. She asked the kids in the class for an example of a time that they felt sad. And one kid raised his hand and said, “Well, I felt really sad last night because my blanket had holes in it and the heat was broken in my house and I was really cold. I was so cold that I was shivering, and I felt really sad.”
And the teacher, who I think was a very compassionate person, but obscured by the curriculum because she had to follow it with fidelity, said something like, “Right. So José felt sad last night. And so what can we do when we feel sad like that? We can breathe in and out,” you know. And I was stunned by the image of this child. He was from an undocumented immigrant family right at the crux of some of Trump’s most vitriolic discourse around immigration. His family had no access to almost any services. It was freezing in Massachusetts that winter and he was sleeping under a blanket with holes in it. And the curriculum was telling him, “This is your problem. The fact that you’re sad … breathe in and out, use your strategies.”
I’m in probably a dozen elementary schools a week, and none of them has social studies in the curriculum at all. Science a little bit. But basically the days are math, reading and SEL. It’s really easy to slip it into equity discourse: you know, “we have to spend this many hours a week on math instruction or else we’re serving inequity,” right? … Schools always, always in the United States have had a mandate to fill that’s unrealistic given the social structures that they exist within, and the amount of time that they have with children. By and large, early childhood and elementary school settings have certainly prioritized SEL over history education, or over any sort of political or democratic education or involvement. That stuff is barely talked about until middle school.
Hulton: I absolutely agree with what Clio was saying, especially there being this huge disconnect for many children, in terms of what their actual emotional reality is and then the somewhat canned responses [from teachers following curricula]. What is actually safe and ok to talk about at school? I also have spent a lot of time with these curricula, and so many of the examples [featured in lessons] are the examples of middle-class white kids. You know, “someone has my pencil and I want it.” I’m not saying those are not important experiences that children do need to go through and figure out how to manage. But I’ve also read lots of [examples in educational research] of children being told, “Oh, actually don’t talk about that, don’t talk about that huge, horrible thing.” That is problematic. I think SEL is also so simplistic in the way that it assumes a sort of sameness. Human interaction is one of the most complicated things in the world! It has so much shaping by cultural difference.
What is it that makes SEL so appealing to so many people?
Stearns: A big part of it is an ongoing and increasing concern with children’s behavior, which partly has to do with an uptick in academic standardization over the last couple of decades in the U.S. When we ask more of kids, we’re stressing them out. And we’re asking a lot more of them academically—and a lot younger. Often, children have no recourse but to communicate via their behavior, and that in turn stresses teachers out, and teachers start looking for ways to manage behavior. But it’s not very kosher to say, “We just want to get kids to behave.” So instead, we dupe ourselves—I mean, I’m guilty of this as well. We dupe ourselves into thinking we’re helping them emotionally, when I think SEL is just really a way of teaching compliance without calling it that.
Hulton: I might echo what Clio mentioned, and then additionally add a bigger context when it comes to wanting to get compliance with out calling it compliance. Lots of issues that used to be okay when it comes to acceptable methods for adults to attempt to handle youngsters’s conduct aren’t okay anymore. So because the sorts of instruments which are out there to adults for managing youngsters’s behaviors have modified, they want one thing—we’d like one thing on the finish of the day to make youngsters conform to these bigger issues that we’re asking of them. Our concepts of what youngsters are and what they need to be able to have additionally modified. We’re asking youngsters to do some fairly grownup sorts of abilities.
There’s a large push to current SEL as one thing that is apolitical, universally good, progressive and forward-thinking. And then there’s this surge of assault and critique, usually by conservative neighborhood teams, which are calling it “liberal indoctrination.” Where do you situate yourselves in that constellation of critique?
Hulton: No matter what the talk is about, I feel I’m actually used to discovering myself simply not properly captured by the edges. Is SEL just a few form of harmless, progressive factor to be celebrated? No, I do not consider it’s. Is it some sort of sinister method to cover over some hidden agenda that the left agrees on? No, it is not. I do not discover both of these methods of interested by SEL significantly true or useful. Neither of them properly seize both the guarantees and pleasures of SEL or the hazards of it. Neither are captured by that framing.
Stearns: Anything we do in faculties goes to be inherently political as a result of faculties are a political phenomenon. They’ve by no means not been. And if something, the push to see them as something apart from that is likely one of the most horrifying re-writings of American instructional historical past that I’ve ever seen. I feel the phrase “indoctrination” is a extremely sophisticated phrase, as a result of no one can totally outline the distinction between indoctrination and training in a usually agreed-upon method. So I do generally suppose there are methods of doing SEL that may be horrifying and damaging in a method that does really feel very very like a problematic iteration of indoctrination to me. But the concept it is in some way leftist indoctrination feels, sort of like Kathleen mentioned, out of skinny air. If we’re going to have fun SEL as a progressive flip in training, then now we have to look actually intently at what it’s. I’ve spent plenty of time finding out a spread of the most well-liked SEL curricula, seeing what occurs in faculties the place these curricula are used, and I’ve by no means seen it do something apart from educate children that their methods of being on the earth inherently are a bit of bit flawed. I am unable to actually see that as a progressive flip.
Is SEL value embracing in our present second? Even within the midst of efforts to make SEL extra culturally responsive and community-led, do a few of these issues stay?
Stearns: I undoubtedly would by no means say faculties and lecturers should not reckon with the emotional lives of kids or lecturers. I simply actually suppose SEL is a misguided method of doing it. I discover that it mainly drives a much bigger wedge between youngsters and lecturers. It’s like another curriculum to get by means of. I feel it is true that this form of desperation for relationality and emotional integrity within the classroom may be very a lot there, and but … there’s an entire host of issues round that. What if lecturers had to perform a little bit extra inside work in interested by how they need to speak about emotions—their very own emotions and children’ emotions? To me, that’s nearly undoubtedly going to be higher than having a predetermined set of language and abilities.
Hulton: I would like to critique these darker sides of SEL, however on the similar time, I don’t essentially suppose it wants to be trashed. It nonetheless shines a lightweight on what lots of people are lacking about childhood, about faculties proper now. What individuals appear to be saying they need is extra connection and extra time to relate to youngsters and for kids to relate to each other, and they need methods to take care of the large emotions which are coming into school rooms. … I like plenty of the instruments [in SEL], however I want they could possibly be offered with extra context about inequality.
