Abstract
The potential for transformative social and emotional learning (SEL) was conceptualized as a lever in service of equity. This article explains the next steps and working assumptions the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has employed to collectively address the inequities that exist in schools. The proposed research agenda has implications for the continuous improvement of various resources. It also supports the formation of research–practice partnerships that will work to find frameworks, spaces, and stakeholder groups that will journey to implement and promote relevant efforts needed to create equitable learning environments where youth can excel.
Keywords
Social and emotional learning (SEL) has grown tremendously over the past two decades. The field has benefited from primary and secondary research that has established SEL as a process that promotes the academic, social, and emotional growth and development of children and youth (Durlak et al., 2011; National Commission on Social, Emotional, & Academic Development, 2019). However, as the field has grown, so have the critiques. Issues of equity have appropriately emerged as one of the more pressing concerns for the field to address. We recently offered the notion of transformative SEL as part of an effort to better understand the ways in which SEL might more explicitly address issues of equity and excellence for diverse groups of youth learning in diverse settings. The work reflects our long-standing professional commitment to the well-being of children and youth of color and those furthest from opportunity. It also was produced as part of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning’s (CASEL) periodic review and revision of its tools and resources based on strategic priorities and needs from the field. Current strategic priorities include equity, adult SEL, and the integration of academic content with social and emotional instruction as features of what we consider implementation of systemic SEL.
Based on CASEL’s existing school-wide framework, we endeavored to make more explicit the promise of SEL to benefit all young people (Shriver & Weissberg, 2020). In this regard, we anchored our analysis on the long-term outcomes of engaged citizenship, which we are offering that equity implies distributive justice and that efforts to advance SEL as a lever for equity and excellence require adopting targeted universalism that promotes power, privilege, resistance, and self-determination as components to intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional competence development (e.g., knowledge, beliefs, skills, and behaviors) of diverse young people and adults. This allowed us to understand SEL to be part of a civic socialization process (Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019) and to lean on the work of Westheimer and Kahne (2004) to help us organize and critically examine the growing literature in SEL and related fields. Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) citizenship typologies present three forms of citizenship: personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented (transformative). Justice-oriented (transformative) citizenship is most interested in focusing its efforts on changing institutions and systems that oppress people. While personally responsible citizenship personifies good character and participatory citizenship is described as active engagement in political activities and civic life, these forms of citizenship are focused or concerned with taking action to implement and promote policies and changes that are consistent with values such as human rights and social justice (see Westheimer & Kahne, 2004, for a more detailed description). As such, we have posited that there exists personally responsible, participatory and transformative forms of SEL.
Transformative SEL is affixed in the concept of justice-oriented (transformative) citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). High-quality, traditional SEL approach, even when offered to all students, has typically fostered competency skills that yield individuals that understand and mange emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish positive relationships, and make responsible decisions (CASEL, 2020). This most certainly offers positive outcomes for society in general; however, it does not mitigate the widespread prejudice, racism, and discrimination that exist in the country today. To put it bluntly, Dena Simmons deemed traditional forms of SEL absent of any sociopolitical context as “white supremacy with a hug” (Madda, 2019), which is why transformative SEL is offered as a necessary reshaping of SEL.
Transformative SEL suggests that individuals should go beyond being prosocial to their neighbor but participate in actions that attempt to resist, disrupt, and dismantle the inequities perpetuated by dominant culture that keeps their neighbor in an oppressed, marginalized position. It is recognized that these inequities marginalize many people from various walks of life based on different conditions and circumstances; however, we focus on issues of race/ethnicity as a first step toward the demolition of inequities. Transformative SEL’s orientation is angled toward transformative resistance and is motivated by distributive justice, which refers to how valued goods and services are allotted equitably (Jost & Kay, 2010), whereby individuals and groups analyze, resist, and redesign to address asymmetries in how certain rights and resources are provided to marginalized and oppressed communities. In the section below, we outline some of the ways in which we intend to examine the working assumptions associated with transformative SEL. That work is being conducted and/or planned with state and district partners and with external collaborators who share some of our interests and commitments. This includes efforts underway in the Equitable Learning and Development Project (ELDP), a collaboration with University of Chicago Consortium for School Research and National Equity Project and other organizations who are working to provide solutions to the challenges that urban schools face daily.
Identity, Agency, and Belonging as Focal Developmental Competencies
With these proposed forms of SEL, there are also new considerations for the five core CASEL competency domains of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. Previous conceptions have focused primarily on constructs that align with personally responsible and participatory forms of SEL. We began some of this work by proposing equity elaborations (see Jagers et al., 2018, for initial work on detailed descriptions of each elaborated competency). Our evolving collaborative work focuses on identity, agency, and belonging. Each construct is understood in terms of its communal manifestation of social identities, collective agency, and a co-constructed sense of belonging. Identity is of particular interest as it is reflective self-awareness and social awareness, and permeates the other competencies as well. If an individual does not understand who they are in the world, they cannot effectively manage themselves or their emotions, relate to others to determine how they will be in relationships, nor make responsible decisions that benefit themselves or the larger group.
Highlighting School–Family–Community Partnerships to Advance Systemic Transformative SEL
CASEL’s current work has appropriately focused on supporting state- and district-level teams to advance the implementation of high-quality systemic SEL. The Collaborating States Initiative (CSI) was launched in 2016 and is actively working with 35 of the 50 states. The Collaborating District Initiative (CDI) began in 2011 with eight districts and currently includes 19 large urban districts. While CASEL offers resources and tools to support school-wide systemic SEL, there remains much to be learned about the ways in which members of school communities within a given district might pursue systemic transformative SEL. We are employing a research–practice partnership (RPP) approach to help us work with interested collaborators to identify, refine, and promote relevant efforts in school, families, and communities. Specifically, CASEL has engaged in an RPP at the school level within a large, urban Midwestern city. The goals of this partnership were to test the accuracy of our theory of action, explore how to innovate ways to integrate SEL into mathematics instruction, and better understand how SEL might be leveraged toward promoting equitable math achievement outcomes for all students. Key insights are being presented in a learning brief series that will be released this summer explaining the importance of SEL being in service of equity and the impact it may have in urban classrooms across the country.
CASEL has also made commitments to better understand the role of families in a transformative SEL agenda. Families play critical parts in the social and emotional development of their children via everyday family interactions (Brooks & Lambert, 2019; Dahl, 2015). Literature suggests families are highly supportive SEL but frame it differently than do researchers (Dworkin & Serido, 2017). More is yet to be discovered about the developmental imperatives families hold for their children and youth (García Coll et al., 1996), which is highly influenced by one’s cultural and personal beliefs (Francis & Cushinberry, 2019). The knowledge families have, if valued and incorporated, can have an instrumental impact on how schools engage in creating appropriate expectations for students while aiding in the creation of equitable learning environments. Other work has pointed to the benefits of family empowerment efforts for getting families more authentically and fully engaged in designing, implementing, and evaluating educational initiatives (Jagers, Williams, & Osher, 2019). We are developing and pursuing such opportunities in our current efforts that will have key contributions to the resources we provide through our guides as well as the aforementioned ELDP work. One aspect of the ELDP agenda is to flesh out an arc of learning linking caregiver discussions with parent participatory evaluation. Through this engagement with families, we hope to empower families to contribute to the investigation of the problem and play critical parts in finding solutions to make schools safe, equitable learning environments for their children and other diverse learners. This approach has seen success in Minneapolis Public Schools (to learn more about this visit, see rea.mpls.k12.mn.us/parent_participatory_evaluation). We know student and family voices are often untapped or undervalued in many educational reform conversations, but these are great opportunities to allow these groups to voice their position as experts of their own lived experience. It would be a disservice to ignore them.
Conclusion
It is evident that there is much work to be done around examining and understanding the potential impact of transformative SEL on young people and adults, yet it is energizing to offer actionable steps toward investigating and creating the appropriate conditions needed to build equitable learning environments. Through this agenda, we hope to gain a nuanced understanding the impact that transformative SEL can have on young people and adults across various learning contexts (e.g., school, family, and community). The information provided here is our working agenda and call to bring together the appropriate stakeholders to improve the spaces in which youth and adults are developing and interacting within so that they all can reach their fullest potential and thrive.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
Some of the ideas presented here are discussed further in Jagers, Rivas-Drake, and Williams (2019).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
