Speaker
Description
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of social-emotional learning (SEL) as a ‘zeitgeist’ that has captured the imagination of educationalists. This neurologically-inflected approach to education – which seeks to cultivate a wide array of ‘non-cognitive’ skills, attributes, competencies, values and traits such as ‘empathy’ ‘wellbeing’, and ‘resilience’ – is increasingly positioned as a solution to complex school-based problems, including bullying. Drawing on cross-cultural analyses of school-based bullying and anti-bullying programmes in Asia, the US and Europe, this paper presents a critical analysis of SEL-based responses to bullying premised on the promotion of kindness, empathy, compassion and respect. It argues that the logics underpinning SEL-informed approaches ignore deeply embedded and systemic dynamics of power and inequality. While not denying the importance of attending to the complex emotional or psycho-affective structures that give shape to, and sustain, bullying and related forms of violence, the paper highlights the inability of SEL-based approaches to meaningfully address the complex co-existence and amplification of bullying in online and offline spaces or to capture complex relations and scales of responsibility for bullying and related forms of violence and harassment. It seeks to complexify our understanding of the wider social forces and enabling conditions which allow bullying and harassment to flourish by advancing an expansive and nuanced theorisation of responsibility for bullying and associated forms of violence that transcend widely recognised subject positions of bully, victim and bystander.
Keywords
Social-emotional learning; social justice; responsibility; bystander, perpetrator, victim
| Please indicate what type of scientific contribution it is | Theoretical contribution |
|---|---|
| Please also indicate what kind of contribution it is: | Scientific |
