Teacher Support for Social-Emotional Development in Post-Conflict Education Systems: A Scoping Review

• In Event: Teachers at the Frontline: Identity, Well-Being, and Professional Practice

Proposal

Across divided and post-conflict contexts, classrooms are often the first public spaces where children from different sides encounter one another after violence. Teachers carry the daily work of making those encounters safe, meaningful, and oriented toward a nonviolent future. This paper presents a scoping review of research on how teachers are supported to foster children’s social-emotional development in post-conflict settings, and how these supports relate to wider aims of social cohesion and peacebuilding. In line with the CIES 2026 theme, “Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World,” the review revisits foundational ideas of peace education and psychosocial support while interrogating how contemporary approaches to social and emotional learning travel across cultures, languages, and political economies affected by conflict.

The review addresses three guiding questions. First, how are teachers positioned as agents of children’s social-emotional development and peacebuilding in post-conflict education systems, and what kinds of supports are provided to enable this work. Second, which practices and professional learning modalities are documented in the literature. Third, where are the critical gaps in concepts, methods, geographies, and implementation that limit the field’s ability to inform policy and practice at scale. These questions are motivated by a practical need articulated by ministries, NGOs, and donors: teachers are frequently asked to “do SEL” and to “build peace,” yet program guidance often under-specifies the supports teachers require, how those supports should be sequenced and resourced, and how success should be defined and measured over time.

Methodologically, this is a scoping review guided by PRISMA-ScR and Arksey and O’Malley’s framework. The corpus will include peer-reviewed articles and grey literature published from 2000 to 2025, capturing the period when SEL, psychosocial support, and conflict-sensitive education became more codified in policy and programming. Searches will be conducted in ERIC, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science, complemented by targeted retrieval from key practitioner repositories, including INEE, UNESCO, UNICEF, and major implementing partners. Studies will be included if they examine teacher-focused supports for children’s social-emotional or psychosocial outcomes in contexts directly affected by conflict or political violence. To address linguistic and regional blind spots, the review will also screen Arabic-language sources where accessible. Data extraction will code for context, conflict history, participant characteristics, teacher support modalities, implementation design, outcome measures, and attention to equity across gender, displacement status, and disability.

The analysis is informed by an ecological lens that links individual skills, classroom interactions, and school-community relations. It brings into dialogue three overlapping traditions: peace education, social and emotional learning, and psychosocial support in emergencies. The review will also attend to teacher well-being, professional identity, and agency, recognizing that teachers’ own experiences of loss, displacement, or precarious employment can profoundly shape what is possible in classrooms. Attention to power and decolonial critiques will surface who defines “competencies” and “evidence,” whose knowledge counts in program design, and how do-no-harm principles are enacted when political narratives enter the classroom.

By clarifying what the evidence already suggests and where it is silent, the review aims to help researchers and practitioners avoid reinventing the wheel while centering teacher agency and context. Its contribution lies in mapping the landscape of teacher supports, identifying conceptual and geographic gaps, and proposing an agenda for research and practice that strengthens the capacity of education systems to contribute to healing, resilience, and social cohesion in societies recovering from conflict. This paper forms the foundational literature review for a larger dissertation on teacher professional support for children’s social-emotional development in post-conflict education systems.

Author

• somaia Abdulrazzak, Harvard University