Crisis as Disjuncture: Social Emotional Learning and the Reconfiguration of Education Governance in Times of Permacrisis

• In Event: Education Governance Future(s) in a Permacrisis World – Policyscapes, Timescapes, and Actorscapes (Part 2): Translation into National Contexts

Proposal

Education governance, traditionally the domain of slow-moving national governments, is increasingly reshaped by the disruptive force of anthropogenic crises. Structures of education governance crumble during crises, producing a profound disjuncture (Appadurai 1990) and upending normative expectations around who governs, how policy is made, and on what timeline. New policies are enacted on an accelerated, donor-driven timeline. Social emotional learning (SEL) is one such policy that is increasingly an important component of education in emergencies (EiE), framed as a mechanism to develop positive behaviors, activate learning, improve well-being, increase economic output, achieve global citizenship, and attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and peacebuilding (USAID 2019; GEMR 2019). This paper will examine the mechanisms that enabled the uptake of SEL as a “solution” to numerous crises, as a case study of the future of education governance in a state of compounding crises.

The disjuncture created by the emergency imaginary creates space and justification for accelerated policy adoption when traditional domestic policy processes are suspended or overwhelmed. I analyze this through three interlinked ‘scapes (Appadurai 1996): the bureaucratic breakdown in favor of novel processes and policies (policyscapes), new and foreign actors (actorscapes), and shifting temporalities (timescapes). The rise of SEL in emergencies serves as a case to demonstrate the way in which these overlapping ‘scapes contribute to understanding future education governance. To do this, I pair expert interviews with actors involved in global education governance with semi-structured, interactive interviews and ranking activities with students, teachers, and parents in Palabek Refugee Settlement, Uganda.

I find that in response to students’ exposure to the adversities associated with crises, novel policies create rapidly shifting policyscapes amid crises. SEL is one such policy, framed as a clear educational response to help children build skills that would enable them to cope and be able to learn – even in the face of crisis. A small number of external actors make up the actorscapes that construct narratives around what policies need to be enacted – including the rise of SEL. Although these actors held altruistic beliefs about the power of SEL based on Western evidence, self-preservation contributed to their desire to promote certain policies that maintained their position in the humanitarian architecture. However, due to the rapid nature of humanitarian timescapes, SEL interventions are often exported “off the shelf” from “global” or Western tools, leading to a temporal disjuncture that undermines the potential for truly transformative, locally-owned, and culturally responsive SEL.

Ultimately, this paper argues that the rapid rise and proliferation of SEL in response to crises represents broader lessons for future education governance. In the current global state of permacrisis, emergency-driven policies are long-lasting in contrast to their rapid development. SEL’s global spread reveals how norms and practices originating in specific cultural and political contexts can become deterritorialized and recoded as universal, even as they retain foundational assumptions that may not resonate across contexts. It also shows how crises can both catalyze reform and foreclose meaningful adaptation, depending on who participates in the policymaking process and under what conditions.

Author

• Rena Deitz, New York University