Social Emotional Learning and Equity

“The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which [they are] being educated.”
– James Baldwin

The promise of social and emotional development as a lever for increasing educational equity rests on the capacity of educators to understand that all learning is social and emotional and all learning is mediated by relationships that sit in a sociopolitical, racialized context – for all children, not just those who are black and brown. Social emotional learning offers the possibility of acknowledging, addressing, and healing from the ways we have all been impacted by racism and systemic oppression and to create inclusive, liberatory learning environments in which students of color and students living in poverty experience a sense of belonging, agency to shape the content and process of their learning, and thrive. This potential will only be realized if we intentionally prioritize educational equity and belonging as a primary goal of social-emotional learning and strategically apply what we know from research on the effects of race and racism, the relationship between culture and learning, and the neuroscience of healthy brain development.

Implications for Professional Learning

To build equity consciousness and capacity, we need to create significant time for professional learning, reflection, and collaboration so that educators have regular opportunities to:

increase their own self-awareness of how their various social identities in terms of race, class, gender, language, etc. shaped their own educational experiences and shape their definitions of success and their interpretations of student behavior
build their knowledge of and reflect on the history of race, racism, and exclusion in the United States and build their skill for discussing this history with students in the context of lessons and class discussions
deconstruct, reflect on, and design lessons that support the active valuing, engagement, and development of the whole child
learn about the neuroscience of learning; those signals that trigger a “threat” response especially for students of color as well as strategies explicitly designed to decrease stress and generate a sense of calm and well-being
develop a repertoire of approaches for building trust, especially across race, class, and culture.

The table below highlights several pitfalls and recommendations for educators seeking to implement SEL to make progress on equity and inclusion:

Table that highlights six pitfalls and recommendations for educators seeking to implement SEL. — Click here to download this chart as a reference tool.
[Image Description: Table with two columns. The left column is titled, “Potential Pitfalls” and the right column is titled, “Recommendations.” The text for each column, row by row, is as follows:
Potential Pitfall: Understanding the purpose of SEL for students of color from a deficit mindset with a focus on developing skills that they do not possess as a result of something missing from them or their families.
Recommendations:
Lead and teach with the understanding that all learning is social and emotional for all students.
Situate any initiative, effort, or program in the historical, socio-political, racialized context of education for students of color and students living in poverty in the United States.
Locate the problem we are trying to solve with SEL work not in individual students, but in our collective response to the conditions of learning we create for students of color and students living in poverty.
Potential Pitfall: Over-emphasis on self-management and self-regulation and under-emphasis on the meaningful development of student agency to lead change and contribute to new, more humanizing and equitable structures of teaching and learning.
Recommendations:
Use SEL approaches to draw out and build on student assets to facilitate understanding and learning.
Begin with listening and valuing of student experience and personal narratives.
Build empathy through story-telling and sharing.
Potential Pitfall: De-valuing student resistance to structures and practices that they experience as unwelcoming, hostile, or dehumanizing; interpreting this resistance as “noncompliance” or “defiance” and evidence of poor self-management skills.
Recommendations:
Deconstruct expectations, cultural norms of schooling, and ways of communicating to expand the definition of success and normative behavior to include the experiences, cultural ways of knowing, and aspirations of students of color and their families.
Potential Pitfall: Asserting colorblind and identity neutral principles and values.
Recommendations:
Expand the notion of self-awareness to include the acknowledgement and understanding of social identities with regard to race, class, gender, nationality, family structure, and how each contribute to one’s sense of power and agency in various contexts.
Normalize the practice of talking about race and understanding events and experiences through the lens of race, culture, and power.
Potential Pitfall: Avoiding the topic of race or leading with the assumption that only students of color need to talk about and understand race.
Recommendations:
Leverage SEAD concepts and practices to build communities of learning that talk about and reflect on the experience race, including racialized events occuring in the present across our country in and our communities.
Include the building of “racial literacy” among all students as a critical dimension of SEL competence.
Build social awareness and empathy skills through students sharing of their lived experiences in their communities and schools.
Potential Pitfall: Underestimating the power of the unconscious to lead us to take actions that are at odds with our stated values.
Recommendations:
Include explicit strategies aimed at mitigating the effects of implicit bias and stereotype threat through values affirmation activities.
Use what we know about socialemotional learning to acknowledge, address, and heal from the ways we have all been impacted by racism and systemic oppression and to create inclusive, liberatory learning environments in which students of color and students living in poverty experience a sense of belonging, agency to shape the content and process of their learning, and thrive.

In order for efforts aimed at developing the social emotional and academic development (SEAD) of students to advance educational equity, we must:

Situate our efforts in the historical, socio-political, and racialized context (white supremacy) of education in the United States.
Approach SEL work with the explicitly stated purpose of creating more equitable learning environments and outcomes (not as an afterthought or add-on).
Ensure that educators begin by developing their own self-awareness, social-emotional intelligence and cultural competence; understanding the cultural reference through which they understand themselves and their students, and surfacing and confronting the ways in which they may be, consciously or unconsciously, contributing to the racial vulnerability of their students.
Engage SEL work with the understanding that ALL learning is social and emotional for all human beings. Understanding how our students are situated to opportunity and belonging in our communities and schools is essential.
Utilize SEL practices to facilitate healing from the effects of systemic oppression, build cross-race alliances, and create joyful, liberatory learning environments.
Simultaneously, focus on dismantling policies and practices that reproduce racial inequity and build new opportunity structures and pathways to existing opportunities to create greater equity.

Making progress on educational equity is long-haul work that requires persistent, collective courage and effort. It will require us to dig deep, to reflect, to question, to deal with our own uncomfortable emotions about inequity and about one another. And, yet, to apply the best of what we know about how human beings develop and grow in service of equity holds tremendous promise for the creation of inclusive, joyful, liberatory learning environments in which our students can discover their unique gifts and talents and thrive. Author Alice Walker suggests resistance is the secret to joy. As we build our social and emotional development practices in our schools, districts, and communities, let’s resist the temptation to do so without acknowledging the historical legacy of racism and exclusion in our public education system. Instead, let’s apply an equity lens to our collective work, question our fundamental assumptions about how we do school, and together create learning environments in our schools that are humanizing, liberating, and joyful for all of our students.