From freedom dreams to realities: Adopting Transformative Abolitionist Social Emotional Learning (TASEL) in schools

ABSTRACT Schools are adopting social emotional learning (SEL) programs, intending to provide students with intrapersonal and interpersonal skills to better prepare them for life. Transformative SEL is designed to promote the building of relationships between diverse students and educators to build more just schools and society. Because SEL models are heavily adopted, this paper addresses the inequities present within them. That is, traditional and transformative SEL fail BIPOC: Traditional SEL perpetuates the status quo by further marginalizing BIPOC and transformative SEL is too conceptual for successful adoption in PreK-12 schools. This article provides a brief discussion of traditional SEL, transformative SEL, and abolitionist teaching frameworks, then highlights educational practitioner narratives that discuss SEL adoptions that have proven harmful. We assert that we must (re)imagine and formulate a transformative SEL based on abolitionist teaching structures, which requires fully engaging the voices of our educators by presenting Transformative Abolitionist Social Emotional Learning (TASEL) framework, a practitioner-friendly SEL alternative framed by the tenets of equity and justice.