Disentangling SEL: Advocating for Black sociality, questioning white teachers’ emotionality

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article disentangles social and emotional learning (SEL) into its 2 constitutive parts—sociality and emotionality through a backward mapping of the School Development Program (SDP) developed by James Comer. This article argues that Comer’s school-level intervention is a process model for how to achieve SEL outcomes given its intentionality toward making schooling a homeplace and its capacity to buildout conditions of Black sociality. The SDP also challenges how teacher preparation programs perpetuates harm to students of color by codifying white emotionality. This harm suggests a need to reimagine teacher preparation. This article thus concludes by recommending that teacher preparation programs should study more models and processes like the SDP and confront color-evasiveness.