Transforming social and emotional learning for the early years: Think Equal’s approach

• In Event: Building the foundations for global citizenship in the early years

Proposal

Against the backdrop of a shift in global discourse from access to quality of education, today's large-scale borderless crises repeatedly illustrate failures of humanity and surface the limits of a persistent functionalist education paradigm around the world. Perhaps this points to the need for re-asserting the more holistic humanizing purpose of education. This need is captured in SDG 4.7 (education for sustainable development/ESD and global citizenship education/GCED), whose ethos may be crystallized as acting towards valuing the dignity of self and others, including the environment – an ethos that intersects with socio-emotional learning (SEL). However, while many recognize the need and importance of SEL as a critical skill for the societies and economies of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, few no-cost/low-cost efforts overtly teach and assess it as a subject of equal gravitas to traditional 'high-value' subjects such as literacy and numeracy.

THINK EQUAL calls for such a system change in education – one where SEL is recognized as a high-value subject in its own right and introduced into the compulsory curriculum of schools from the earliest years when, according to neuroscientists, the child is most cognitively malleable. To give SEL equal import as literacy and numeracy requires, at minimum, an explicit curriculum addressing the various aspects such as empathy and emotional literacy is needed. THINK EQUAL collaborated (and continues to do so) with leading researchers in SEL theory and praxis, to develop such a concrete curriculum with tangible resources, which includes hundreds of highly detailed lesson plans and assessments, as well as books and kits suitable even in low-resource contexts. THINK EQUAL’s pilot programs in schools around the world have demonstrated the possibilities of this overt approach and structural challenges that need to be negotiated during planning and implementation. This presentation will discuss these learnings, and how our work may help position SEL as a high-value subject, whose explicit teaching and assessment can improve the quality of education in the early years in schools around the world.

Author

• Jasodhara Bhattacharya, Think Equal