Social-Emotional Skills for Facilitating Racial Equity Discussions

• In Event: Five Perspectives on Leveraging Systemic Social and Emotional Learning to Create Equity in Schools

Abstract

Despite increasing awareness and calls for racial equity professional development, recent reviews of research on racial equity training indicate mixed outcomes (e.g., Calanchini et al., 2021; Carter et al., 2020; Devine & Ash, 2022; Paluck et al., 2021). Given the increasing demand for racial equity professional development, and the critical need for shifts in educational systems, there is a need to focus on factors that make racial equity sessions effective, including an under examined factor: facilitator social-emotional skills (brown, 2021; Elliott, 2021; Ieva, Beasley, Steen, 2021). Facilitators need to attend to the social-emotional dynamics of the group space that they are creating, draw on their own social-emotional skills, and help participants focus on their own social-emotional development to sustain a lifelong racial equity commitment. In this paper we describe ways that five SEL skills play a role in facilitation.

Data Sources & Methods. Our team synthesized previous conceptual and experimental research and reflected on our own practice experience as facilitators in a school-based program. Although a wide range of literature was reviewed, the current findings draw most closely on 74 studies from psychology, education, higher education, and social work. We pulled common topical clusters related to our primary research question: How do facilitators use SEL skills when leading racial equity discussions?

Results. Across sources we determined that past literature and findings could be aligned with CASEL’s 5 social emotional skills. See Table 1 for results and alignment and extension of findings into new considerations for this unique context.

Discussion. Key applications of racial equity facilitation strategies will be reviewed across CASEL’s 5 skills and recommendations will be made for practical ways to notice and refine these skills. As expected from previous studies and our own reflections, self-awareness surfaced as one of the most prominent social emotional skills. Self-awareness will help facilitators see patterns in their own thoughts, emotions, assumptions, reactions, and behaviors through the critical lens of their own positionality. But once these patterns are visible to the facilitator, the two most prominent ways self-management was described was for making space for a facilitator’s own emotions and for participants’ emotions, and managing emotions to sustain engagement. Our experiences aligned with previous social work literature on the use of social awareness to see group dynamics, power, and hierarchies among participants (Hackman, 2005; Miller & Donner, 2000; Sue, 2013).

Relationship skills were most directly aligned in the empirical conflict management literature and conceptual education literature, for communicating clearly, negotiating conflict, navigating power differences, creating belonging, and managing contexts with different norms (Jagers et al., 2019). Finally, responsible decision-making skills were evident in knowing when to respond to harm and modeling an enhanced commitment to disrupting racism (Bensimon & Harris, 2007; Hackman, 2005).

These experience-based recommendations include how facilitators can become more aware of the role of SEL skills in specific facilitation strategies and cultivate a daily practice of reflection and strengthening key skill areas.

Authors

• Shannon B. Wanless, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Caitlin Spear, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jocelyn Artinger, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jennifer O. Briggs, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author