Nurturing kind compassionate CHILDREN

Rising awareness of the importance of formal SEL (social emotional learning) is timely in post-pandemic India where social tensions and religions, caste, class and gender fault lines are manifesting in a slowing economy experiencing rising unemployment and inflation

- RAMIYA SAKTHIVEL, CYNTHIA JOHN & MINI P.

One of the most promising developments in early childhood and K-12 education worldwide is rising awareness among educationists, social scientists and increasingly within teachers communities of the importance of children's social and emotional learning (SEL).

Athough SEL is not a new concept in K-12 education children's SEL skills have been developed for several millennia through scriptural instruction, sermons, moral science and civics textbooks the idea of developing distinct SEL syllabi and curriculums that would address the "missing piece" of education, crystallised in the US in 1994. In that year, a multidisciplinary group of educationists, teachers and child rights activists promoted CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning).

Building on the research of Dr. James Comer, a professor at Yale University, and John Dow Jr, who introduced a programme to develop the "whole child" in two schools in New Haven Connecticut in 1987-92, a group of educators and researchers began the New Haven Social Development Programme that designed a framework for teaching SEL in K-12 classrooms.

In 1997, nine CASEL collaborators co-authored Promoting Social & Emotional Learning: Guide for Educators. Since then, formal SEL has been integrated into syllabuses and curriculums in K-12 schools across the US and around the world. "CASEL has helped grow SEL from a promising theory to an essential part of education. As a non-profit, non-partisan leader in SEL, we are uniquely positioned to evaluate programming, curate research, inform and partner on implementation," says a CASEL spokesperson (see www.casel.org).