Critically conscious school leaders' sensemaking of social-emotional learning

ABSTRACT

A growing number of schools are adopting social-emotional learning (SEL) programs to address students' social, emotional, and academic needs. The proliferation of school-based SEL programs has spurred more research to investigate the ways in which educators enact SEL in schools. However, very few studies have considered the role school leaders have in leading and implementing school-based SEL. Scholars have determined that school leaders play a vital role in deciding how school-based initiatives and policies are taken up. Furthermore, research has determined that a person's sensemaking of policy messages, which involves their prior beliefs and consciousness, influences the ways in which a policy or initiative, such as SEL, is enacted. Using sensemaking theory and critical consciousness as an analytical tool, this study analyzes how critically conscious school leaders make sense of SEL in order to center students' race and culture. I amplify the voices of critically conscious school leaders and their leadership actions to offer a robust theorization of unconventional employment of SEL that centers students experiencing marginalization because of their race and culture. This research inquiry answered three interrelated questions centered on education policy, school leadership, social-emotional learning, and race and culture 1) What are Washington State's school-based SEL policy messages? a) What was the nature of the development of Washington State's school-based SEL standards? 2) How do critically conscious K-5 school leaders make sense of school-based SEL messages? a) What beliefs and conceptions do these K-5 school leaders have about SEL? 3) What are the school leaders' actions that lead towards centering students' race and culture in SEL?I conducted a critical qualitative multiple-case study to answer the research questions guiding this inquiry. I collected SEL documents from Washington State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) website and received copies of OSPI's meeting agendas, notes, and other materials from their SEL Benchmarks Workgroup, totaling 103 documents. Furthermore, I purposefully selected school leaders from two schools in Washington State to interview and observe. During the 2020-2021 school year, I collected data from Iris Elementary and Pine Elementary during the Covid-19 pandemic, when both schools increased their SEL efforts. Iris is a dual-language immersion school, while Pine resides on a federally recognized Native American reservation. Both schools have a majority of students who are marginalized in schools and society because of their race and culture. During the six months of data collection, I conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with thirteen individual school leaders. Due to the pandemic, I could not observe the school leaders in person;however, I observed 64 meetings via video conferencing platforms. The findings from this study show that the ways in which standards are developed send particular messages to the people charged with implementing the policy. Secondly, this study revealed that school leaders' sensemaking of SEL revealed that their prior beliefs, racial and cultural school context, and opportunities to critically self-reflect mattered for how they made sense of SEL. Lastly, this study found that school leaders' actions illustrated how they shaped and shifted their respective schools' culture by focusing on community values and justice to create an anti-racist environment. In short, I found that policy design matters for messaging, school leaders' ideologies and racial and cultural context dictate how a policy is understood, and SEL has the latitude to disrupt the status quo by attending to students' race and culture. These findings have implications for education policy design, school leadership and SEL research, and sensemaking and critical consciousness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)