Students’ reproduction and transformation of norms incorporated into a programme for social and emotional learning

ABSTRACT

The present ethnographic study aims to explore how students reproduce and make use of a programme for social and emotional learning to create their own moral orders and routines for interaction in their local school context. The study demonstrates that the students made use of routines and norms conveyed by the programme to negatively position and exclude peers as well as to reproduce discourses of ‘blaming the victim’. The results highlight the inappropriateness of implementing a programme that strips emotions and behaviours of their meaning and that fails to situate emotions within students’ actual social and cultural contexts. The study demonstrates how such an approach relocates the responsibility for dealing with socially and culturally situated problems to the individual and denies teachers the opportunity to respond to problematic situations that give rise to emotions of anger and that emerge in social and cultural contexts at school.

KEYWORDS:

• SEL
• school-based intervention
• mental health
• school bullying
• children’s perspectives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Sofia Kvist Lindholm http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9812-7410

Notes

1. The SET programme consists of 399 exercises specified in a manual. The manual is used to structure SET lessons carried out with students once or twice a week from preschool to upper secondary school (Kimber 2011).

2. The key skills taught in SET are: self-awareness, managing emotions, empathy, motivation and social competence (Kimber 2011, 6–7).

3. Ethics approval was obtained from the Regional Ethical Review Board of Linköping University (Reg. no. 2010/50-31).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Thematic Studies and by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health [grant number HFÅ 2008/213].