Grit, Resilience, and Settler Colonial Logics: A Critical Systematic Review of SEL Literature

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Reclaiming Knowledge, Reimagining Futures: Latiné Youth, Families, and Cultural Pedagogies of Resistance

Abstract

In this Systematic Literature Review, the authors argue that SEL frameworks, which are both under-theorized and deployed as acultural technologies, pathologically frame the affect and emotions of Latiné youth. We focus on how discourses of ‘grit’ and ‘resilience,’ which inevitably emerge from SEL projects in US schools serving Latiné youth, reify racism and ableism and other contingencies ascribed to Latiné youth. This review, which is part of a larger project focused on SEL for Latiné youth, illuminates how the sustainment of the settler colonial state and power majority rely on the glorification of ‘grit’ and ‘resilience’ to keep marginalized communities constantly seeing assimilation and depoliticization as solutions to the social, race, disability, and class issues they experience.

Authors

• Chelsea Stinson, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Jose Ortiz, SUNY Cortland