Fellows

Salzburg Global Fellow Kelsey Dalrymple offers a critique of current practices around social emotional learning in education in emergency settings

Children make up 41% of the world’s displaced population, and an estimated 224 million crisis-affected school-age children require education support. Children affected by crisis and displacement often suffer extreme trauma and can become trapped in a cycle of displacement and poverty for decades. Education in emergencies (EiE) practitioners and Child Protection in Emergencies (CPiE) actors believe social emotional learning (SEL) could promote both psychological wellbeing and academic achievement in crisis and displacement contexts. 

SEL has been explicitly linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and specifically Goal 4: to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. While actors like the Education Cannot Wait fund argue that education in general is foundational to achieving all other SDGs, UNESCO argues that supporting students to develop skills in emotional resiliency and prosocial behaviors are necessary for positive outcomes at the individual level, and also promotes human flourishing, which is critical for achieving the other SDGs. In fact, UNESCO’s Education 2030 Agenda specifically underlines the importance of aligning social and emotional capabilities with education for peace and sustainable development, so as to help prepare young people to meet major environmental, economic, and social challenges. Additionally, the NISSEM network maintains that SEL is an important contributor to positive behavioral change, which is a necessary condition to achieve greater social cohesion and respect for peace, cultural diversity, and human rights. As such, significant monetary and human resources have been invested in SEL for displaced and crisis-affected communities, with even more funds pledged to develop SEL measurement tools and generate programmatic evidence.

However, qualitative interviews conducted between 2020 - 2022 with over 50 EiE and CPiE practitioners, scholars, and donors working on SEL at the global level, and specifically the East Africa region, reveal a number of discrepancies between the global sustainability agenda and the reality of SEL programming. For example, respondents expressed that their SEL work largely aims to help develop skills and competencies, as well as effect behavior change and improve wellbeing, at the individual level. While some practitioners and scholars have argued that SEL has the potential to address key drivers of societal conflict and other factors that lead to situations of violence and displacement, no respondent linked their SEL programming to larger efforts of conflict-prevention, peace-building, or social cohesion that could help to prevent future crises and displacement. 

Additionally, the intention behind many SEL initiatives is to improve learners’ psychosocial wellbeing by supporting them to cope with stress and trauma, and to thrive in situations of crisis and displacement. However, while critical thinking skills were among the competencies that these SEL initiatives aim to support learners to develop, no respondent reported that their SEL programming encouraged displaced learners to critically reflect on their rights or to challenge their situations of displacement. There is a clear absence of any rhetoric or content related to social or restorative justice throughout SEL programming with displaced and crisis-affected learners. 

Finally, there appears to be promising efforts by EiE and CPiE actors to help integrate SEL into national education systems. However, no respondent reported that their engagement with government actors on SEL included conversations related to the national integration of refugee and displaced students. While many actors are engaging with Ministries of Education in processes to develop contextually-relevant SEL frameworks, the query of “relevant for who?” is not being considered; government enthusiasm for SEL appears to apply mostly to national students and not the displaced or crisis-affected students they are hosting.

These findings indicate that while SEL is often theoretically linked to the global sustainability agenda, in practice, EiE and CPiE actors are not actually designing and delivering SEL activities with sustainability in mind. This is not surprising as humanitarian initiatives for displacement and crisis contexts were never supposed to be sustainable; they were always intended to be short-term solutions to short-term situations. However, more and more humanitarian situations are becoming protracted, resulting in millions of people languishing in crisis and displacement for decades. As education and protection are human rights, bolstered by the global sustainability agenda, EiE and CPiE actors are mandated to continually search for resources to sustain their programming, thereby feeding into this unsustainable humanitarian system. As SEL has become a highly popular trend in both sectors, receiving immense amounts of funding and resources, it is critical to reflect on its impact and function. If EiE and CPiE actors: 1) do not prioritize the inclusion of displaced and crisis-affected individuals into national systems when engaging with government actors on SEL, and 2) if SEL activities continue to focus on building individual skills without linking them to larger concepts of social justice and social cohesion, thereby supporting children and adults to cope with their situations of displacement rather than to break free from them, one must beg the question: is SEL simply sustaining the unsustainable?

Kelsey A. Dalrymple has nearly 15 years of experience in the fields of education and humanitarian response. She spent three years as an international classroom teacher and since then has worked as an  Education in Emergencies Specialist. Kelsey has worked in various humanitarian contexts serving in coordination, research, program management, project director, technical advisor, and sector-lead roles. She specializes in: teacher training, early childhood development, social-emotional learning, play-based learning, girls’ education, and youth empowerment. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is critically examining the use of social emotional learning with refugee and crisis-affected communities. Her research is rooted in the fields of Comparative and International Education, Anthropology, and Education in Emergencies and she utilizes qualitative, critical, ethnographic, and visual methodologies.