Recontextualization and Resistance: The role of National and Local Actors in Multiscalar SEL Policy-Making in Lebanon

• In Event: Power & Defiance: Local Resistance to Global Social and Emotional Learning

Proposal

This paper draws on a larger comparative case study that examined the complex processes and underlying mechanisms in the formation of Lebanon’s SEL policy since the Syrian refugee influx in 2011 (Jeong, 2022). The study traced SEL as an example of globally mobile education policy, rapidly circulating and deterritorialized (Edwards, 2021; Robertson, 2018; Steiner-Khamsi, 2010). By focusing on the SEL policy adoption and formation processes in Lebanon, I examined how, why, and by whom SEL has traveled between and across territorial boundaries and illuminated the power dynamics between the various policy actors. Empirically, I drew on policy document analysis and 51 semi-structured interviews conducted from September 2020 to June 2021 and 20 follow-up unstructured interviews conducted in June 2023. Analytical frameworks from cultural political economy approach (Jessop, 2010; Sum & Jessop, 2013) undergird the study.

This study demonstrates that the institutionalization of SEL in the national education system in Lebanon was not a simple top-down transfer or diffusion of a “best practice” policy but something that evolved through interactions across the actors, events, and the technological apparatus at multiple scales (Gulson et al, 2017; Peck & Theodore, 2010). In addition to providing funding and technical support, my findings showed that SEL policy ideas and terminology were largely decided and introduced by transnational actors. In order to work with multiple donors, national policy-makers adopted the SEL discourse but they did not necessarily adopt global SEL practices, thereby exercising their agency. They recontextualized and maneuvered internationally funded initiatives to align with the national political, economic, and cultural priorities (Silova, 2002; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). In the process of recontextualization, the local intermediaries played key roles in mediating domestic policies to successfully institutionalize SEL in the national education system (Dale, 2018).

At the local level, the study demonstrated that teachers resisted the assumption that they would take the role of SEL policy implementers. They were unaware of the national SEL policy initiatives despite the expectation that they would implement the policies in classrooms once they were endorsed (Ball, 2016; Rizvi & Linguard, 2010). Additionally, while teachers’ mistrust was most strongly expressed toward national policy-makers, they also shared skepticism towards transnational actors in devising education policies for Lebanese teachers and students. This mistrust sometimes resulted in actively resisting SEL policy and programs. Furthermore, the paper describes Syrian refugees as a group who had been omitted from the national SEL policy and would likely be further disadvantaged because of exclusive policy and structures imposed on refugees.

While national and local actors exercised their agency through recontextualization and resistance of global SEL policy and programs, they were still reactive to transnational actors’ initiatives and constrained by structural barriers. Thus, the roles undertaken by transnational, national, and local actors in those processes are reflective of highly unequal power dynamics in the global education aid architecture (Maguire, 2019).

Author

• Jisun Jeong, American University - School of Education