Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning: Psychodynamic and Cultural Perspectives

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Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been steadily gaining traction in education, but little attention has been paid to its underlying assumptions. In Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning:Psychodynamic and Cultural Perspectives, Clio Stearns draws on qualitative classroom observations, teacher interviews, and analysis of prominent SEL program materials to offer a critique of SEL as a codified phenomenon. Stearns questions undergirding presumptions about children, teachers, and SELs interplay with cultural and educational trends. Claiming that SEL participates in cultural demands for hegemonic positivity, Stearns illustrates the dangers and undesirable demands of this impossible curricular regime. In particular, Stearns highlights how closeness and understanding in the classroom are repeatedly circumvented and how normative and necessary parts of life like negative affect and interpersonal conflict are disregarded. In Stearns's view, the educational community should not consider children's social and emotional worlds as fair domain for mastery or learning. Instead, we should consider social and emotional education as something without a predetermined endpoint, requiring the joint and ongoing participation of teachers and students

Reviews

This book would be a great read for those in journalism who are interested in being reporters, possibly reporters of trauma.

* Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Clio Stearnss multidimensional study of early childhood pedagogy richly portrays anxieties, frustrations, and miscommunications made from educators attempts to manage affect through a pre-packaged curriculum that flounders in the over-excited world of childhood. Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning is a thoughtful inquiry into education as an emotional situation along with justification for appreciating the depth and surprises of the inner world. -- Deborah P. Britzman, York University and author of Melanie Klein: Early Analysis, Play, and the Question of Freedom
Dr. Stearns paints a rich portrait of two classrooms separated by socioeconomic forces, but both in the grips of social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula. Demonstrating the neoliberal underpinnings of how young childrens emotions were defined and disciplined across these two sites, Dr. Stearns shows the perniciousness of what she smartly calls hegemonic positivity. For those of us - and that is many - who have felt vaguely discomfited by the rise of SEL, this book provides an analysis that equips us to speak out about this increasingly omnipresent set of assumptions and practices in American classrooms. -- Gail Boldt, Penn State University

Author Bio

Clio Stearns, PhD, is educational consult and adjunct instructor at Westfield State University.