Honoring the Cultural Backgrounds of All Students

Extensive research has shown the benefits for children and adolescents who learn social and emotional skills in school, including positive mental health, academic achievement, and improved life outcomes. When social and emotional learning (SEL) is implemented shallowly, though, with a focus on strict behavior management and without a clear commitment to cultural sustainability and equity, advocates believe it cannot live up to its promise.

Emily Meland, currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says she experienced first-hand the need to support teachers’ capacity to implement SEL when she was a second-grade teacher. In her school, more than 90% of students were Latino and native Spanish speakers, but the majority of the teachers, including herself, were white and neither native Spanish speakers nor from the community itself.

“As teachers, we knew the importance of supporting students’ social and emotional development, and yet, schoolwide, when we talked about social and emotional learning, what we were really talking about was behavior management,” Meland says. There was a narrow focus on academic achievement, she explains, “rather than the development of the whole child in ways that honored the skills, insights, and experiences the students brought from home.” 

When Meland went looking for SEL resources that addressed culturally responsive teaching practices she was unable to find anything that brought the two approaches together.

Meland and Senior Lecturer Gretchen Brion-Meisels recently discussed a new research paper in which they propose a model of SEL that centers the role of educators and environments, and highlights the skills needed to promote culturally sustaining social and emotional learning in schools. 

Drawing on culturally sustaining pedagogy, where students’ unique backgrounds and identities are considered integral to teaching and learning, the model identifies three foundational capabilities for educators:

1. Critically reflect 

Educators are self-aware and take a critical look at how issues of equity and power play out in their classrooms. It can be helpful for teachers to reflect on their own ethnic and racial identities and consider the potential impact on the expectations they have for their students, for example.

2. Build caring, authentic, and reciprocal relationships with students

Teachers care about their students and play an active role in removing any barriers to their growth and success. Supportive relationships are the “active ingredient of all learning and development,” explains Meland.

3. Shift the balance of power

Educators give their students voice, agency, and “responsibility for and direction over their own learning and development,” in developmentally appropriate ways, according to the model. For the preschool set, for example, power-sharing might involve a morning meeting where children get to vote on something about the school day. While in middle school, students might be allowed to choose certain rules and consequences. Then, in high school, students might sit on the school improvement team, lead teacher professional development, or help staff develop school policies, explains Brion-Meisels.

The researchers also highlight two important processes for teachers and students that help make the work of culturally sustaining SEL possible:

• Co-regulation 

Humans need help from each other to regulate themselves. The problems for SEL arrive when adults are allowed to “abdicate their responsibility for and their participation in the regulation” of their students by pointing to the need for students to develop self-regulation, Meland says. “Behavior is communication,” she explains, “and for the children who are often labeled as not being able to self-regulate, those children are communicating something loud and clear about their environment, about their experience, about something that's not working.” Co-regulation focuses our attention back to the relational nature of our learning environments and of social emotional development.

• Co-construction 

Students and teachers work together to create the learning environment and build knowledge and skills. Educators can seek input from students by designing feedback cycles and developing classroom charters to ensure there are ongoing conversations about what is working, what is not, and what everyone needs to thrive, explains Meland.

At the top of Meland and Brion-Meisels’ model sit practices, initially developed by HGSE’s EASEL Lab, that the researchers say should be present in the classroom environment for culturally sustaining SEL to work:

1. Inclusive and predictable norms, structures, and routines.

Classroom systems, expectations, and routines that draw on young people’s “strengths, abilities, interests, and backgrounds and invite all students to participate.”

2. Activities, lessons, and content that incorporate multiple methods of teaching and encourage students to engage with identity, justice, and collective action.

Instruction recognizes the many different ways that students learn and includes explicit SEL curricula that “accurately incorporate[s] students’ histories, heritages, cultures, and experiences.” Students can practice seeing the perspectives of others and displaying empathy and compassion across various divides.

3. Intervention that is individualized.

One-on-one time with individual students may be needed to develop SEL skills. Regular communication with families and caregivers is also important.

Fostering students’ social-emotional well-being, and building on their individual and collective strengths, is something that Brion-Meisels insists is required for all high-quality teaching. Although the new model is designed primarily in the context of educators and students in a classroom, Meland says it can also be used by school and district leaders in their support of teachers and other adults. “I think it more broadly reflects the kind of environments that you’d want to see for adults to grow and thrive as well,” she adds.