The Motivating Affordances of Research-Practice Partnerships for Examining Equity-Based Social and Emotional Learning Instruction

• In Event: Motivating the SEL Field Forward Through Equity

Abstract

Across the U.S., school leaders are realizing the potential for social and emotional learning (SEL) to be used as a critical lever for students’ equitable access to full participation in social and civic life. Researchers and practitioners seek to understand how teachers can elevate student voice, increase students’ sense of agency, and promote civic engagement through social and emotional learning (SEL) instruction. The School and Community Pathways for Engagement (SCoPE) Project brought together teams from a large school district, a research university, and a nationally-recognized nonprofit in a research-practice partnership (RPP) to examine these persistent challenges.

In this session, we demonstrate how purposeful collaborative relationships between researchers and practitioners in the SCoPE project motivated deeper investment and equity of voice for all stakeholders. Coburn, Penuel, and Geil (2013) define RPPs as research collaborations grounded in five fundamental values: 1) long-term partnerships, 2) focus on problems of practice, 3) commitment to mutualism, 4) use of intentional strategies to foster partnership, and 5) producing original analyses. We will demonstrate how the SCoPE project embodied these values in our approach to participant recruitment, data collection, and data sharing throughout this longitudinal, sequential mixed-methods project.

The goal of the SCoPE project was to understand how teachers may “stretch” their SEL classroom practice to be responsive to students and their families’ identities and social justice concerns, and in this way, demonstrate transformative SEL (Jagers, Rivas-Drake, & Williams, 2019). Although this is an emerging concept, stretching refers to the ways teachers adapt their beliefs and practices for SEL teaching to critically consider and responsibly address their students’ experiences of injustice. Drawing on data and experiences from the SCoPE project RPP, we will illustrate how teachers at one school stretched from traditionally social justice-evasive notions of SEL to engage social justice issues more proactively in their SEL implementation. We will also illustrate how intentional RPP strategies aligned to the key values--such as leveraging professional learning communities focused on problems of practice and hiring locally-based community research assistants to facilitate relationships--supported the mutually beneficial goals of the SCoPE project.

Authors

• Gina McGovern, Central Michigan University

• Colin Ackerman

• Deborah Rivas-Drake, University of Michigan

• Alexandra Skoog-Hoffman, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning

• Robert Jagers, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning