Social and emotional pedagogies: critiquing the new orthodoxy of emotion in classroom behaviour management

Abstract

This paper examines new structured attempts to address and manage emotions in the classroom. Critical analysis focuses on the broad emotional literacy agenda operating within schools, and more specifically the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme. Data are drawn on from an ethnographic study located in Behaviour Support Units in three mainstream, inner‐city comprehensives to highlight the gap between the ‘rational emotionality’ being promoted and the fraught, and often uncontainable, emotions that drive everyday school life. It is also argued that the therapeutic model underpinning SEAL activities in schools risks individualising and thereby misinterpreting socially and culturally embedded difference, pathologising particular pupils in the process.

Keywords:

• inclusion
• SEAL
• emotionality
• exclusion
• behaviour support

Notes

1. The project, ‘Disruptive Behaviour in the Classroom: Exploring the Social Subjectivity of Disaffection’, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant number RES‐061‐23‐0073.

2. BSUs are facilities (often self‐contained) within mainstream schools and are designed to address issues around conduct. Pupils are sent to the units for varying amounts of time, ranging from weeks to years. The terminology used to describe these units varied between schools. We use BSU as a generic term to describe them all.

3. Circle time was a regular event in the BSUs and required pupils to sit in groups with a teacher and discuss their personal feelings about a variety of issues.