(Un)Standardizing Emotions: An Ethical Critique of Social and Emotional Learning Standards

Background: This study took place within a policy context in which the state of Ohio, echoing moves across the country, adopted a set of K–12 Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) standards based in the work of the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL) and its core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. As one of the first states to make such standards part of the state reporting system for school progress, and considering recent critiques of the hegemonic, normative impacts of SEL, we engaged in a systematic analysis of these standards to consider how they affect and further exacerbate the systemic oppressions experienced by multiply-marginalized people in schools. Purpose: This article reports on the normative assumptions in the Ohio SEL standards, using critical discourse analysis (CDA) and the DisCrit tenets to engage in an ethical critique of the real and potential social effects of these standards. Situating these standards relative to existing scholarship on race and dis/abilities in school, we show how the Ohio SEL standards and the CASEL competencies ignore racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privilege civility over productive conflict; and focus on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people. Research Design: This is a qualitative study whose data were derived from an analysis of the Ohio K–12 Social and Emotional Learning Standards and the CASEL core competencies. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our ethical critique of the Ohio K–12 SEL standards and CASEL core competencies demonstrates how benign acquiescence to their expressed assumptions may negatively affect the experiences of multiply-marginalized people in schools. By ignoring racism, ableism, and other oppressions; privileging civility over productive conflict; and focusing on behaviors over emotions, especially when expressed by Black, Brown, dis/abled, and queer people, SEL standards may undermine or erase the critically productive role that emotions have played in movements for social justice. If we truly want to prioritize the actual social and emotional learning of all students in schools, we need a framework that explicitly names inequities, allows for collective agency, and acknowledges and enables access to emotions. Making space for these emotions, although considered by some to be outside the “norm” of acceptable classroom behaviors, would allow all students to be seen for who they are, to truly express how they feel, and to create and take up opportunities, themselves, for social change and justice.