How Is Social and Emotional Learning Accepted by High School Students in Health and Physical Education Class?

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research in Progress Roundtable Session Two
  In Roundtable Session: Social Emotional Learning and Student Motivation (Table 14)

Abstract

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has become more interesting as the integral half that should be accomplished in public education. As the main subject caring for students' holistic health, Physical Education (PE) has been teaching not only physical competencies but also many aspects of SEL (Wright & Richards, 2022). Along with a growing number of academic interests in SEL, there is a lack of understanding regarding how students are accepting SEL in PE. It is crucial to shed more light on the black box between teaching and learning (Hamre et al., 2013). In this regard, this is a pilot study to understand how students accept SEL in PE. On the ground of symbolic interactionism, a curriculum in PE was followed on the base of repetitive social interactions. Individual meanings were encouraged and shared using symbols during social interactions in PE class, which established and defined shared meanings. Participatory action research (PAR) was used for this study (Koshy et al., 2010) and a researcher proactively jumped into the field and collected data both as a teacher and researcher. Qualitative inductive and deductive analysis were used together for data analysis (Miles et al., 2014). The result of two cycles of deductive coding compared to the symbolic interactionism framework. Students have accepted SEL in three different ways: accepting, confused, and pretending. These three themes were not static but fluid states, that is students who were in accepting sometimes moved to confused or pretending states and vice versa. This study presented how students accept the PE course concentrated in SEL. In reality, there are not always filled with sunshine and rainbows. Students wandered around accepting, confused, and pretending states. Even though it seemed natural and inevitable, the ultimate purpose of educators is to guide students in accepting area as many as possible. Given the result of this study, researchers and practitioners need to discuss content. In other words, clearer and more succinct SEL content are in needed for PE. Although this course used research-based common teaching strategies (Jones et al., 2017), it did not specify SEL skills to develop. Without having better guidelines and expected outcomes, students are unlikely to be immersed in a situation developing SEL skills. Teachers are not able to keep more dive into and encourage students' SEL. This pilot study needs to be shared and discussed in order to develop and solve methodological and analytical issues.

Author

• Yongjin Lee, University of North Carolina - Greensboro
  Presenting Author