Why Social Emotional Learning Needs to Be Culturally Responsive if Schools Want to Promote Educational Equity

• In Event: Culturally Relevant Embodied and Social-Emotional Learning in Asian, African, and North American Contexts

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the importance of adapting SEL practices and assessment of social competencies to meet the developmental and educational needs of diverse learners that are in North American early education settings. As the number of multicultural youth in the United States and Canada continues to increase, early education classrooms reflect the expanding culturally and ethnically diverse population (Li, 2000; Vespa et al., 2020). Thus, for children in the United States and Canada to gain the social and emotional skills needed to develop and succeed in their society, socio-emotional learning must reflect the diverse socio-cultural make-up of North American contexts at large.
Given the multicultural and multiracial composition of many North American schools and classrooms, young children’s early social interactions will involve cognitive, physical, and emotional interactions with peers from different cultural backgrounds. It follows that through these peer interactions, children will likely by exposed to others whose language, norms, and/or values differ from their own. For children with bi- or multi-cultural backgrounds, the pressures to assimilate to the dominant sociocultural norms will likely be high as they strive to be viewed as socially accepted, appropriate, or competent (Kowalski, 2003). As such, the demand to assimilate becomes the responsibility of the minority child, as they are expected to participate and engage in social practices reflecting a culture (i.e., the dominate socio-cultural norms) that may not reflect their lived experiences at home. For minoritized youth, the inability to exhibit the social emotional skills of the dominant culture is viewed as socially incompetent or deficient. This narrow and rigid expectation of what social competence, adjustment, and learning looks like based on a single mainstream culture inherently marginalizes children raised in cultural minority homes and instead fosters a cultural deficit perspective for these children (Garcia Coll et al., 2000).
We advance the argument that to promote educational equity, it is critical for schools that serve multicultural families to implement SEL curriculum that includes the values and goals of families from culturally diverse and marginalized backgrounds. SEL curriculum that are aligned with the lived experiences and histories, as well as the authentic activities, contexts, and cultures, of the learners will increase the likelihood that SEL skills will be adopted and practiced in students’ everyday lives. For this form of SEL curriculum to be effective in multicultural contexts, students, teachers, and key community members must all be included as stakeholders who are empowered to co-create a curriculum with shared values, norms, and practices that reflect the multicultural composite of the school community (Niemi, 2020). This type of framework and approach will foster authentic school-family-community partnerships to develop and will promote safe, healthy, and inclusive school environments for all members of the community (Mahoney et al., 2020).

Authors

• Samantha Dyanne Aguilar, Texas A&M University

• Jeffrey Liew, Texas A&M University