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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Social emotional learning (SEL) is commonly understood, from a Western perspective, to be the development of thinking, behavioral, and regulatory skills needed for learning and everyday life (Jones & Doolittle, 2017). This understanding of, and approach to, SEL has been prevalent in the Global North for over two decades and has demonstrated positive and sustained effects for children’s psychological well-being and academic achievement in largely Western societies (Jones et al., 2017; Cipriano, et al., under review, 2023). As a result, SEL has been increasingly adopted by governments in the Global South and integrated into national education systems (Deitz et al., 2021, Jeong, 2023). Additionally, SEL has been taken up as a policy and programming solution to promote learning and well-being in contexts affected by crises and fragility (ECW, 2021; USAID, 2018). Education in emergencies (EiE) actors have positioned SEL as a promising practice with the potential to improve academic achievement and support psychosocial well-being, trauma-recovery, and resiliency for refugee and crisis-affected learners (INEE, 2018; UNESCO, 2019).

Numerous scholars and practitioners have demonstrated that the way SEL competencies are conceptualized, prioritized, defined, and displayed are highly tied to culture and societal behavioral standards that shape the way people understand, interpret, and make meaning of their experiences (Brush et al., 2022). Despite this discourse, the Western concept and approaches to SEL have been transferred and institutionalized across national governments, EiE practitioners, and other education actors as “global best practice”. Indeed, the assumption that SEL competencies found in Western frameworks are universally applicable to all children globally is highly pervasive (INEE, 2016). While research on SEL in the Global South, and particularly refugee and crisis contexts, has recently increased, there has been little examination of: 1) how, why, and by whom SEL has become a traveling global education policy and adopted as national policy; 2) the connections, and disconnections, between global, national, and local conceptualizations and practices of SEL; and 3) how refugee and crisis-affected individuals experience, co-opt, and/or resist SEL.

In this panel, we address this lacuna of scholarship through the presentation of three empirical studies that examine the transfer and effects of SEL in refugee contexts. We interrogate the evolution of the Western conceptualization of SEL as a “global best practice” and situate this tension within a vast policyscape of actors and events at multiple scales over time. The three papers in this panel provide case studies of SEL policy and practice in Lebanon, Uganda, and Tanzania targeting local refugee and host-communities, and document how these communities experience, recontextualize, co-opt, and resist global SEL.

The first 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. It focuses on the role of national and local actors and the key drivers of their (non-)involvement in the SEL policy-making processes. Instead of adopting SEL as a complete model developed in the Global North, Lebanese policy-makers strategically recontextualized SEL according to national priorities. Teachers and local actors resisted their assumed role as implementers of SEL due to endemic mistrust of the Lebanese government, and Syrian refugees were omitted from the national SEL policy, and thus further disadvantaged. Although the national SEL policy-making process in Lebanon was perceived to epitomize collaboration among actors at multiple levels, this paper reveals that the roles undertaken by transnational, national, and local actors in these processes are reflective of highly unequal power dynamics in the global education aid architecture.

The second paper explores the incentives for transferring and adopting SEL through a case study of the Palabek Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda. The study demonstrates that although the incentives for exporting and importing SEL differ across actors, they align in a way that creates conditions ripe for the transfer of SEL from global donors, to national organizations, to local communities. Although local importers invoke the language of the global exporter, findings show that how they define and interpret those constructs differs from the global definitions. As such, this paper illuminates how local communities are usurping the soft power of global actors by retrofitting the meaning and approaches commonly used in SEL to suit their needs.

The third and final paper presents an in-depth ethnographic study that examined the effects of SEL on a Burundian refugee community in Tanzania. The study found that while contemporary forms of global, or Western, SEL approaches have been delivered within the community over the last five years, Burundian conceptualizations and practices of SEL have been influenced by global actors over the last two decades, at multiple scales, through classic policy borrowing and lending practices. This paper demonstrates the complex, and historical, neocolonial power dynamics of delivering SEL in refugee and crisis-contexts, and the local struggle of Burundian refugees against the global dominance of Western SEL.

Together, these papers illustrate how the transfer and institutionalization of SEL is not a simple top-down diffusion of a “best practice” policy, but rather a complicated and dynamic process that evolves through interactions across actors, events, and policies at multiple scales and over time. While neocolonial and unequal power dynamics are embedded in, and reinforced through, this process, we showcase how refugee communities and local actors exercise their own power through co-opting and resisting “global” SEL. Significant resources have been, and continue to be, invested in SEL globally, especially in refugee and crisis-contexts. Therefore, a better understanding of these complex dynamics and processes will hopefully encourage donors, policy-makers, and practitioners to: 1) reconsider if and how they adopt and implement SEL “global best practices”; 2) recognize and uphold the agency and power of SEL recipients, particularly refugee communities, in order to not perpetuate neocolonial and unequal power dynamics; and 3) acknowledge the larger social, economic, and educational inequities existing in national education systems in order to address issues of inequity and social justice for refugees and other marginalized populations.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Recontextualization and Resistance: The role of National and Local Actors in Multiscalar SEL Policy-Making in Lebanon - Jisun Jeong, American University - School of Education

• Usurping Soft Power: Translating and Co-opting SEL for Local Aims in Palabek Refugee Settlement, Uganda - Rena Deitz, New York University

• Local Defiance of Global Dominance: How Burundian Refugees in Tanzania Resist Western SEL - Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Discussant

• Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland