Liberatory Practices From Margin to Center: Reimagining SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) Norms and Community Engagements With Black Children

• In Event: Disrupting Notions of Normalcy and White Supremacy: Radical Imaginations Across Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives: This presentation explores how daily morning rituals at Liberation school - an Africentric Elementary Summer school program- made new possibilities visible for social-emotional learning (SEL) with young Black scholars. The joyful and participatory rituals privileged community engagements, and expansive ways of being and knowing in schools that disrupt white normativity. Whiteness in U.S. institutions is a normative ideal that presumes white middle-class abled-bodied, practices and ways of being as ‘normal’ and then requires the minoritized ‘others’ to measure up (Annamma et al. 2013; Delgado & Stefancic, 2016). These ideals transmitted through a hidden curriculum- the unspoken or implicit values, behaviors, procedures, and norms that exist in the educational setting (Alsubaie, 2015)- perpetuate the exclusion of and disadvantage of Black children and communities (Lopez, 2020). Social-emotional learning (SEL), as frequently implemented for Black children, is part of a dehumanizing process that seeks to assimilate children into dominant ways of being, enforces compliance and normalizes oppressive structures (Simmons, 2021).

Theoretical framework: I draw on bell hook’s (2014) theorizing on engaged pedagogy to identify, reflect on, and unsettle, educational practices that sustain individualism, racism, classism, and patriarchal norms. hooks’ engaged pedagogy situates joyful, liberatory and deep learning in educators’ ability to catalyze and nurture students' experiences, discovery, and community engagements.

Methods: My dissertation research uses a Black Emancipatory Action Research (BEAR) framework (Akom, 2011) to: 1) disrupt notions of objectivity and universality of knowledge; 2) blur researched researcher binaries and; 3) privilege self-determination, social justice, equity, healing and love in educational research. The BEAR framework also expands individual conceptualisations of racism to examine ways in which institutions and majoritarian cultural practices can perpetuate racism without relying on racist actors.

Data sources: I attended daily the Liberation school’s energizing opening assembly featuring motivational affirmations, cheers, chants, and a Read Aloud. I examined through observation, participation, formal and informal interviews with children, educators, parents and administrators how the rituals supported different modes of communal, embodied, collective, joyful engagements and contrasted with typical SEL programs implemented to mirror behaviorist systems of classroom management and control (McManus, 2021)

Results: The Liberation school morning ritual centered community instead of individuals, active and loud participation instead of stillness and quiet obedience, and encouraged critical community conversations around identity, culture and race. Findings reveal that these SEL rituals co-constructed with children and centering their curiosities, identities and experiences (Simmons, 2021) disrupted normativity and antiBlack racism in schools. By rejecting the historically and socially constructed inherent criminality of Black children, the Liberation School nurtured childrens’ curiosity, community, joy, freedom to be, to matter, to be represented, to take up space, to be visible and thrive (Jones & Hagopian, 2020).

Scholarly significance of the study
Education researchers, scholars, and practitioners can construct new educational possibilities that dismantle Anti-Blackness by seeking to learn with and from communities that have gotten it right and reject practices that have not served Black children. Refusal creates possibilities for developing alternative modes of thought and existence which increase communities’ capacities and expand their possibilities (Taylor, 2009).

Author

• Natacha Ndabahagamye Jones, University of North Texas