SOE researchers Rivas-Drake, Rosario-Ramos, and McGovern describe educators’ use of Transformative SEL with Latinx youth
A new brief written by a U-M team and released by The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) illustrates transformative SEL in practice based on surveys with youth, interviews with teachers, and observations during dedicated SEL instruction time in a predominantly Latinx school in a large urban district.
“Rising Up Together: Spotlighting Transformative SEL in Practice with Latinx Youth” was authored by SOE professors Deborah Rivas-Drake and Enid M. Rosario-Ramos, SOE postdoctoral research fellow Gina McGovern, and former SOE faculty member and VP of Research for CASEL Robert Jagers. The research described and the preparation of this brief was supported by a grant from the William T. Grant Foundation.
As stated in the brief, “Transformative SEL was introduced as a way to integrate an explicit equity and social justice lens into the conceptualization and implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL). As Jagers, Rivas-Drake, and Williams (2019) explain, it is a form of SEL aimed at interrupting the reproduction of inequitable educational environments by attending to issues of identity, agency, belonging, and related issues such as power, privilege, prejudice, discrimination, social justice, empowerment, and self-determination. Since the introduction of transformative SEL, questions have arisen about what it looks like in practice.”
Recently, the authors embarked on a project to help elucidate the potential of transformative SEL for teaching practices in the middle school grades. A central goal of the project is to clarify how SEL can better leverage youths’ emerging understandings of community issues and broader social injustices, as outlined in the transformative SEL framework.
The brief spotlights examples of the ways educators worked to connect the dots between SEL, ethnic/racial identity development, and emerging civic and sociopolitical development among Latinx early adolescents. It also demonstrates how, in the course of their work, they were promoting the CASEL 5 Core SEL competencies, which were updated in 2020 to include expanded definitions and examples of knowledge, skills, and attitudes for creating equitable communities.
The authors hope these examples illustrate how teachers may adapt their SEL instruction to foreground community concerns and social justice issues as a way to support students in seeing how social and emotional well-being has been historically tied to social, economic, and political injustices. Many of these strategies build upon and adapt existing frameworks for implementing school-wide SEL and fostering developmental relationships to focus on developing students’ collective agency to examine and interrupt inequities. Furthermore, the authors aim to show how transformative SEL instruction may support not just students’ SEL but also their active, informed, and critical participation in civic and political processes in their communities and beyond.
Featured in this Article
