Building Social-Emotional Learning From the Ground Up: Prioritizing Refugee Community Wisdom

• In Event: It Takes a Village: Supporting Diverse Children’s Social-Emotional Well-Being Through Community-Engaged Research

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
The purpose of this presentation is to advocate for a paradigm shift in extant approaches that aim to engage community stakeholders in guiding social emotional learning (SEL) programs for refugee youth. Specifically, we will focus on moving away from rampant top-bottom modalities that place community members’ worldviews about adaptive SEL competencies at peripheral levels. Instead, meaningful, just, and effective community engagement must entail appreciating their beliefs about children’s idealized social and emotional skills before the development of SEL pedagogy. In this presentation, we will explore concrete examples of elevating refugee community voices to lead the development of brief SEL interventions for youth in active forced migration, specifically focusing on the process of doing so.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The United Nations Children’s Relief Fund (UNICEF) estimates that in 2020, almost half of the global refugee population were children, and 1 in 3 children living outside their countries of birth were considered refugees. These children face an intertwined set of adversities throughout multiple stages of their displacement that places them at a high risk for experiencing disruptions to their social, emotional, and cognitive development. There is a burgeoning interest among the humanitarian aid community to harness the power of SEL in ameliorating some of these consequences. However, many extant programs have been designed using imperialist mindsets that conceptualize refugees as inept at guiding their own growth. Further, the use of frameworks originally designed for use within stable western nations in emergency contexts has led to ample cultural and contextual incoherence. This presentation will build on principles of culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) and use scholarship by Barrera and colleagues (2011) distinguishing between approaches to preventative interventions for “subcultural groups” to situate this presentation.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This presentation will build on previous mixed-methods empirical studies engaging in the cultural and contextual adaptation of SEL interventions for refugee youth. Using a case-based approach, we will explore the specific processes involved in engaging refugee communities in the development of SEL pedagogy. Data are drawn from past scholarship by this author.

Results of this presentation will delineate concrete steps that are integral components of engaging refugee communities in the process of developing SEL programs for their children. These results will specifically focus on the experiences of refugee communities who are in active migration as an example of a specific population with unique cultural and environmental contexts.

Scientific or scholarly significance
Many recent systematic reviews of psychosocial support programs for refugee youth suggest that there are serious limitations in the extent to which current interventions have been able to change their social and emotional outcomes. We believe that these limitations are at least partially rooted in the typical top-bottom process of community engagement, and the paradigm shift we advocate for can be a promising direction. This presentation is especially timely given the growing number of forcibly displaced children and families worldwide.

Author

• Zainab Hosseini, Stanford University