Culturally Sustaining Social and Emotional Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice

Abstract

In recent decades, social and emotional learning (SEL) has become widespread in classrooms across the United States and around the globe, as an ever-growing body of research links the development of social emotional skills to positive outcomes in school, work, and life (Cipriano et al., 2023; Jones & Kahn, 2017; Moffitt et al., 2011). In practice, SEL in schools has also encountered challenges related to definition, implementation, and equity. High quality SEL implementation must integrate educator characteristics with characteristics of the environment, the program materials and structure, and critically, the participation of students themselves, to support culturally, contextually, and relationally rich practice. Ultimately, this requires a focus on the structures that support adults and adult capacities to develop a deep understanding of SEL skills themselves, how they develop, and the multitude of ways they may be expressed (Cipriano et al., 2023; Osher et al., 2016). This dissertation aims to support the integration of research and theory about equitable and culturally sustaining SEL with practice by contributing three papers. In the first paper, I present a theoretical model that integrates the core principles of successful SEL practice from developmental and prevention science with culturally sustaining and asset-based pedagogies. I propose that culturally sustaining SEL in the classroom rests on three core adult competencies: 1) engaging in critical reflection; 2) building caring, authentic, and reciprocal relationships; and 3) shifting the balance of power toward the developing students. These competencies are both strengthened by and enacted through the facilitative processes of co-regulation and co-construction and are the foundation upon which culturally sustaining classroom norms, structures, and SEL practices are built. As SEL arrives at a crossroads of practice, policy, and politics, a flexible, adaptable, responsive, and co-constructed model of culturally sustaining SEL in the classroom offers a path forward that honors and sustains the diversity of our classrooms and deepens the commitment to equity in practice. In the second paper, I address a challenge in SEL implementation science. Despite strong evidence that SEL skills can be taught in schools, the implementation of SEL programming for adolescents has shown mixed results, with many programs proving to be largely ineffective or even showing slightly negative impacts for some youth (Yeager, 2017). SEL for adolescents is likely to require skillful adaptation and responsiveness to the identities, interests, and motivations of students by educators. In this paper, I argue that effective SEL may look less like fidelity to a specific set of scripts, sessions, or activities, but rather a commitment to the wholeness of a set of core principles, relationships, and opportunities for adolescent exploration and leadership/ empowerment, or what I call integrity of implementation (LeMahieu, 2011). To make this case, I describe one promising approach to adolescent SEL - youth participatory action research (YPAR) - and the ways in which studying integrity in the YPAR process can provide key insights into social and emotional learning and development for youth. In the third paper, I present a design-based research (DBR) study of a K-12 teacher professional development (PD) course focused on engaging student feedback that incorporates all three foundational CS-SEL adult competencies outlined in Chapter 1. I find that effective PD on this topic is characterized by a psychologically safe community of practice that scaffolded teachers through a structured feedback cycle and collective sense-making. Five mechanisms emerged that supported educator growth: affirming existing practices, acknowledging emotional responses to feedback, engaging in social learning, participating in guided reflection, and cultivating psychological safety. At the level of classroom practice, critical elements included a clear feedback cycle, intentional pauses for educator reflection, narrowing the focus of inquiry, and engaging students in iterative cycles of dialogue and experimentation. This study contributes to our theoretical understanding of “integrity of implementation” (Chapter 2) at two levels: 1) the design and delivery of the teacher professional development; and 2) the classroom feedback processes themselves.