SEL vs. Transformative SEL

Public schools and distinguishing the difference

For many who lean right, the acronym “SEL” — for Social Emotional Learning—has become a demonized three-letter code for “luring children into emotion micromanagement”. But there’s a key difference that emerged in 2020, that dramatically shifted the narrative.

Entire FAIR article here.

Summary:

For most of its existence, the rationale for SEL has been that encouraging emotional and character development is just as important as teaching facts and skills, and may be essential to helping students perform well academically. SEL, it is argued, provides the psychological foundation necessary for students to master academic challenges and live fulfilled lives.

However, 2020 marked a turning point in SEL programs, when The Collaborative for the Advancement of Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is widely recognized as the authoritative source for social-emotional learning curricula, introduced “Transformative SEL.”

Transformative SEL dramatically shifts the focus from the individual acquisition of social and emotional competencies to encouraging students to understand their personal experiences primarily according to race, gender, or other group classifications. These identity categories are assumed to determine a person’s status in society as either an oppressor or a victim. 

Transformative SEL entirely redefines CASEL’s original five basic SEL competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. Social awareness for example, now includes “critical social analysis,” “public regard of one’s racial group,” and “actions to ameliorate oppression and injustice and to realize liberation.”

Ultimately, Transformative SEL diminishes students’ identities and teaches them to flatten themselves and others into stereotypes.

As the authors of The Coddling of the American Mind have observed, “This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of ‘Us Versus Them’ directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”