Social and Emotional Learning
= "Social-emotional learning sounds like a progressive, child-centred agenda, but behind the scenes it’s primarily concerned with new forms of child measurement." [1]
Contextual Quote
"The SEL measurement infrastructure instantiates psychological governance within education, one underpinned by a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention."
- Ben Williamson [2]
Characteristics
Ben Williamson:
"First, SEL needs to be understood as the product of a ‘psycho-economic’ fusion of psychological and economics expertise. Long-standing collaboration between the positive psychologist Angela (‘Grit’) Duckworth and the economist James Heckman in the measurement of social-emotional learning and related ‘non-cognitive’ qualities illustrates this interdisciplinary combination. These psycho-economic experts have attained remarkable transnational promiscuity as authorities on social-emotional learning and its measurement.
But this psycho-economic fusion also illustrates a wider political context where psychology and economics have become dominant forms of expertise in contemporary governance. This is not necessarily novel, but as big data have become available it has become increasingly possible to gather behavioural and other psychological data from populations, which may be embraced by authorities (governmental or otherwise) in economic forecasting and political management. Heckman, Duckworth and other SEL authorities embody a political economy in which human psychological qualities are translated into psychometric data as quantitative measures of potential economic value, and behavioural data has become a source for governmental ‘nudging’ and control.
Policy mobility: The second key point is about ‘policy mobility’ and the sets of moving relations among think tanks, philanthropies and campaigning coalitions which have been central to establishing SEL as an emerging policy field. Big players in the US include CASEL, the Aspen Institute and the Templeton Foundation. They, like the OECD, are forming relations with experts and packaging up SEL in glossy brochures, meta-analyses, evidence digests, and summaries of existing psychometric data, in order to attract policy commitment. They are, in other words, involved in the painstaking work of assembling diverse sources and resources into actionable policy-relevant knowledge.
Rather than a project of central governments, then, SEL is the product of networked governance involving organizations from across sectors and working from diverse perspectives and interests. Yet despite considerable heterogeneity, these organizations are slowly translating their different interests into shared objectives, forming coalitions, and producing ‘consensus’ statements that seek to stabilize social-emotional learning as a coherent area of policy development.
Money moves: Third, SEL is a site of considerable movement of money. There’s a lot of investment in SEL programs, SEL-based edtech products, and philanthropic funding of SEL organizations. For example, both the Gates Foundation and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative have generously funded some of the key SEL organizations mentioned above. A statistical algorithm has been devised to calculate the economic value of social and emotional learning, and prediction of substantial return on investment has stimulated a very active impact investing sector. Government departments are also funding SEL through, for example, grants for schools.
As such, SEL is thoroughly entangled with financial mechanisms which show how education policy has become inseparable from market logics. Money is flowing into businesses from investors, and into schools from governments, and into classroom practices through impact investment, all of which is making SEL appear practicable while also contributing to the production of ‘evidence’ about ‘what works’ for further policy influence. The beneficial social ‘return’ of SEL is also generating lucrative return for investors, as financial investment has begun to prefigure official policy intervention.
Policy machinery: The fourth point is that a huge industry of SEL products, consultancy and technologies has emerged, which has allowed SEL practices to proliferate through schools. Edtech platforms, with reach into thousands of schools globally, may even be understood as new producers of policy-relevant knowledge, by generating large-scale SEL data in ‘real time’ and an extensive evidence base at the kind of scale and speed that bureaucratic international organizations or state departments of education cannot match. They act as practical relays of the commercial aims of SEL edtech providers into the spaces and practices of pedagogy at scales exceeding the national or local boundaries of education systems.
We might think of such edtech devices as policy machinery in their own right. SEL is building momentum through teacher resources and edtech markets, as well as through the work of consultants and in-service professional development providers. The policy infrastructure of SEL is, then, populated by people doing new kinds of policy work but also by nonhuman policy machines that are active in school practices and in the quantification of student affects.
Glocal policy: Fifth, while much SEL activity is working in mobile ways across national borders, its enactment is also contingent on local, regional and national priorities. In the UK, for example, the Department for Education has focused on ‘character education’, partly as a result of advocacy by the Templeton Foundation-funded Jubilee Centre. In California, ‘growth mindset’ measurement is being tied to school accountability mechanisms.
At the same time, however, how SEL is locally enacted is dependent upon the global markets of resources and technologies available—which allows a device such as ClassDojo to participate in classrooms globally, directly through the fingertips and observations of teachers. As such, SEL exemplifies the increasingly ‘glocal’ character of education policy, with flows of transnational influence on local practices and local priorities sometimes scaling back up to the global. Edtech SEL products emanating from Silicon Valley, for example, travel globally and bring concepts such as growth mindset–which originated at Stanford University–into schools thousands of miles distant from the culture of entrepreneurial self-improvement in the tech sector.
Global metrics: The sixth and final main point is about the OECD’s effort to create a standardized global metric for SEL. The OECD overtly brings together psychology and economics with the test positioned as a way of calculating the contribution of social-emotional skills to ‘human capital’. Directly informed by the economist James Heckman and by the personality theorist Oliver John, the OECD test uses the Big Five personality testing method and labour market calculations to connect up students’ socio-emotional qualities to quantitative socio-economic outcomes. In this way, the OECD test shows how students’ psychological qualities have been ‘economized’."
(https://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/psychodata)
Typology
Erec Smith et al. :
"Traditional vs. Transformative
The original version of SEL can be called “Traditional.” It is most simply described as the cultivation of emotional intelligence in students. Emotional Intelligence is the affective counterpart to IQ, hence its popular moniker of “EQ” to signal its relationship to the intelligence quotient.
EQ consists of four major components: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Social (or Relationship) Management. The goal is to cultivate these skills not by avoiding or suppressing emotion, but by “displacing” emotion. Emotions like anger, sadness, and even fear should be felt; they are a part of the human experience. However, EQ promotes controlling these emotions instead of having these emotions control us. What’s more, it shows how emotions can be channeled to best benefit all involved. Ultimately, it enhances resilience and interpersonal skills in healthy and productive ways.
SEL is the pedagogical manifestation of EQ. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, the person most associated with EQ as a theory and practice, gives an example of an ideal longitudinal SEL curriculum. In “The Importance of Emotional Intelligence,” Goleman writes the following.
[I]n the early elementary years students should learn to recognize and accurately label their emotions and how they lead them to act. By the late elementary years lessons in empathy should make children able to identify the nonverbal clues to how someone else feels; in junior high they should be able to analyze what creates stress for them or what motivates their best performance. And in high school the SEL skills include listening and talking in ways that resolve conflicts instead of escalating them, and negotiating for win-win solutions.
Indeed, Goleman argues that SEL is “the active ingredient in programs that enhance children’s learning while preventing problems such as violence.”
In the 10th Anniversary edition of his seminal book on EQ, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Goleman relays the concrete effects of SEL programs, citing a meta-analysis of 668 evaluation studies conducted by Roger Weissberg, former director of the Collaborative of Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The results of the meta-analysis were as follows.
The data show that SEL programs yielded a strong benefit in academic accomplishment, as demonstrated in achievement test results and grade-point averages. In participating schools, up to 50 percent of children showed improved achievement scores, and up to 38 percent improved their grade-point averages. SEL programs also made schools safer: incidents of misbehavior dropped by an average of 28 percent; suspensions by 44 percent; and other disciplinary actions by 27 percent. At the same time, attendance rates rose, while 63 percent of students demonstrated significantly more positive behavior. In the world of social science research, these are remarkable results for any program promoting behavioral change. SEL has delivered on its promise.
SEL, in its original manifestation as the pedagogical version of EQ, seems to have powerful results that help students both overcome emotional distress and better ensure a more emotionally intelligent environment. It cultivates “antifragility,” a term popularized by Nassim Taleb, which denotes not only resilience and robustness in the face of trials and tribulations, but the ability to derive benefit from those trials and tribulations, to make lemonade out of lemons, as it were.
However, in the past several years, Traditional SEL has given way to what CASEL has dubbed “Transformative SEL.” One may ask whether the adjective is redundant. After all, Traditional SEL is inherently transformative. It turns out that Transformative SEL is similar to its Traditional forerunner except for a keen focus on “social justice” as a primary goal. The CASEL website states that Transformative SEL “concentrates SEL practice on transforming inequitable settings and systems, and promoting justice-oriented civic engagement.” That is, this new SEL is the cultivation of emotional intelligence insofar as it contributes to social justice ends. This explains why the term “Transformative SEL” is not redundant; it denotes societal not individual transformation.
Nothing is wrong with a social-justice practice that is deeply informed by SEL, but Transformative SEL reflects the converse dynamic: it informs SEL with social-justice ideology. In so doing, Transformative SEL doesn’t supplement traditional SEL, but replaces it.
The push to replace Traditional SEL with Transformative SEL is clear from the number of “BIPOC” activists who now accuse the former of being ineffective for BIPOC students, if not inherently racist."
(https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/social-emotional-learning)
More information
- Empowered Pathways ... "strives to rescue SEL from the illiberal usages of many (not all) activists on the progressive left and to build upon Traditional SEL and apply it to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives to ensure a more generative and civil movement for racial equality."
Articles
* Article: Psychodata: disassembling the psychological, economic, and statistical infrastructure of ‘social-emotional learning’. By Ben Williamson. Journal of Education Policy 36(4):1-26, October 2019 (DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2019.1672895)
"Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. Constituted by an expanding infrastructure of technologies, metrics, people, money and policies, SEL has travelled transnationally through the advocacy of psychologists, economists, and behavioural scientists, with support from think tank coalitions, philanthropies, software companies, investment schemes, and international organizations. The article examines the emerging SEL infrastructure, identifying how psychological and economics experts are producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge and statistical psychodata to influence the direction of SEL policies. It examines how the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills, a large-scale computer-based assessment, makes ‘personality’ an international focus for policy intervention and ‘human capital’ formation, thereby translating measurable socio-emotional indicators into predicted socio-economic outcomes. The SEL measurement infrastructure instantiates psychological governance within education, one underpinned by a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention."
* Article: SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING Empowerment or Ideology? Jason Littlefield and Erec Smith. Free Black Thought.
URL = https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/social-emotional-learning
"Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is a hot topic these days, especially because of its adoption of the tenets of Critical Social Justice in K-12 schools. The mere fact that learning focused on children’s emotional development is causing an uproar may be as surprising as it is concerning. Who could be against students learning about emotions and how to handle them in both individual and social settings? No one, we hope. However, because SEL has been revised to reflect elite ideology, and given its new descriptor “Transformative,” there is a growing move to “stop SEL.”
Therefore, the shift towards Transformative SEL has produced two issues worth discussing:
1) Because Transformative SEL is based in a theory that views “the individual” as problematic, it is not ideally conducive to individual social-emotional wellbeing
.2) To neglect individual social-emotional development, especially at this fraught moment, could have long-lasting negative effects on both individuals and society."
(https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/social-emotional-learning)