Reckoning with Racial Erasure: Reimagining Social and Emotional Learning in the Education in Emergencies Sector

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Contesting Dominant Paradigms: Race, Play, Pandemic, and Teachers in Education in Emergencies

Proposal

In recent years, social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a central pillar of education in emergencies (EiE) programming, widely positioned as a critical intervention for supporting children’s psychosocial wellbeing, learning, and resilience in crisis contexts. Yet, this paper argues that the global diffusion of SEL—largely based on conceptual frameworks developed in the United States—has occurred with minimal interrogation of its racialized histories, its colonial logics, or its implications for equity and justice in crisis-affected settings. Drawing on critical race theory and grounded in the authors’ experiences as practitioner-researchers, this paper critically examines SEL’s promotion in the EiE community as a racial project rooted in white saviorism, white ignorance, and epistemic supremacy.

The paper traces how SEL has evolved from efforts to “fix” Black and Brown children in the U.S. education system to a globalized intervention that often erases race from its conceptual underpinnings and ignores the historical and structural causes of crisis. It reveals how humanitarian SEL programming, rather than empowering communities, often reifies Global North superiority, commodifies children’s suffering, and imposes narrow behavioral norms that align with white, Western, middle-class values. Through historical analysis and personal reflection, the authors demonstrate how well-intentioned EiE actors—including themselves—have become complicit in reproducing systems of racial domination under the guise of care, protection, and healing.
In response, the paper calls for a racial reckoning within the EiE sector, one that moves beyond performative acknowledgments of colonial entanglements toward tangible practices of antiracism, reparation, and decolonization. The authors draw on Sriprakash (2023) to propose three interrelated dimensions of reparative SEL practice: (1) material reparations, involving a redistribution of power and resources; (2) epistemic reparations, centering Indigenous, localized, and community-based understandings of well-being; and (3) pedagogical reparations, demanding critical self-reflection and the unsettling of dominant ideologies. Rather than seeking to universalize SEL through prepackaged toolkits and global standards, they advocate for relational, co-constructed, and contextually grounded approaches to social-emotional development that emerge from the lived realities, traditions, and aspirations of crisis-affected communities.

This paper contributes to ongoing debates about what peace, protection, and education mean in a deeply divided world. It challenges the assumption that SEL is a neutral good, instead exposing how current practices may reproduce harm under the banner of help. As EiE actors grapple with increasing global inequality, displacement, and violence, this paper invites the field to reimagine education as a space not only of safety and learning but of reckoning, repair, and liberation.

Authors

• Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland

• Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison