Transposed Yet Intact: The Global Diffusion and National Reframings of Social-Emotional Learning in National Education Reforms

• In Event: Global Trends in Education Reform Amid Political Upheaval and Cultural Transformation

Proposal

We are witnessing a dramatic shift in education systems worldwide. Today, the idea that students’ social-emotional development should be fostered in educational settings is almost taken-for-granted. Policymakers at the local, national, and global levels increasingly position social-emotional learning (SEL) as a policy priority (Cefai et al., 2018; OECD, 2024), including its incorporation in implementation frameworks for Sustainable Development Goal 4.7 (UNESCO, 2019), while teachers and schools expand their usage of SEL curricula and programs in developed and developing contexts alike (Skoog-Hoffman et al., 2024; Jeong, 2023). Understood as a learning process to acquire skills to regulate emotions, build positive relationships, and make responsible decisions, SEL has been applied to a wide range of educational outcomes, including academic achievement, civic identity development, school safety, social justice and inclusion, broadly imagined as a panacea (Bryan, 2022; Osher et al., 2016). Above all, it marks a growing belief in the role of education in fostering emotional well-being and mental health in driving social progress (Nachtigal, forthcoming).
Recent research has begun to document the rise of SEL in the global educational discourse, primarily pointing to its individualizing, neoliberal nature, influenced by SEL’s Western conceptualization as a tool for extending individual autonomy by fostering student self-awareness and self-management (Yliniva et al., 2024; Williamson, 2021). However, in some non-Western contexts, SEL has been imported to cultivate self-discipline, respect, and even obedience (e.g., Singapore’s Character & Citizenship Education Syllabus, Ministry of Education, 2021, Jukes et al., 2021). Still, in other non-Western contexts, despite misalignment with collectivist local cultures, SEL has been constructed in individualizing terms, encouraging students to develop a strong sense of self (Deitz, 2024). This country-level variation and tensions in the construction of SEL stemming from political, social, or cultural differences is the focus of this study. The proposed analysis is the first cross-national analysis of the discourse on SEL in national reforms, to answer: 1) what are the national political, economic, and cultural determinants of adoption of emotional growth as a learning goal in national education reforms?; 2) To what extent does the global discourse in national reforms discussing emotional growth is framed in an individualizing logic (e.g., self-awareness, self-management) or in collective-oriented logic (e.g., respect, social harmony, civic duty)?; 3) What are the national political, economic, regional, and cultural determinants of either of these logics?
I propose to use a word embedding model, a natural language processing method, to analyze reform descriptions in WERD and thus construct dependent variables that capture the cross-national SEL discourse (broadly construed) and its different logics. I then use these dependent variables in a series of multilevel panel regression models, accounting for the nested structure of WERD as well as between-country variation. Results will contribute to the growing literature on the global expanding discourse on SEL by account for cross-country variation. Theoretically, this analysis will provide evidence on the global diffusion process of a multivocal concept through its transposition outside the culture in which it has emerged (Powell & Padgett, 2012).

Author

• Tom Nachtigal, Stanford Graduate School of Education