Exploring and Resolving Challenges to Designing Culturally Responsive SEL Practices

School-based practitioners implement social and emotional learning (SEL) programming in ways that are preplanned and curriculum-centered whereby they follow prescriptive agendas when facilitating SEL lessons while completely ignoring the cultural values, community practices, and lived experiences of students of color when building social and emotional competencies (SECs). From this perspective, SEL supports are underutilized in that they target emotional regulation and social problem-solving skills, but they fail to address social conditions that students of color experience, including social injustice, inequitable treatment, and racial trauma. While scholars call for culturally responsive approaches to SEL, pre-service and in-service school-based practitioners struggle to transfer culturally responsive theories to the classroom when designing instruction, making prepackaged, prescriptive, and preplanned curricula programs of choice. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was twofold: (1) to explore problems and contradictions seven school-based practitioners experienced concerning culturally responsive SEL (CR-SEL) and (2) to co-design an intervention aimed at resolving problems and transforming contradictions in order to construct CR-SEL activities. Cultural-historical Activity Theory (CHAT)-inspired design-based research (DBR) approaches to interventions informed the study whereby school-based practitioners problematized their SEL practices and co-designed an intervention to reimagine SEL that included their students’ cultural values, community practices, and lived experiences. Practitioners engaged in a seven-week professional development training via Zoom. I analyzed their descriptions of problems based on early meetings (meetings 1 and 2), middle meetings (meetings 3 through 5), and later meetings (meetings 6 and 7). During early meetings, practitioners engaged in a focus group, where they dedicated time describing specific problems they experienced with culturally responsive teaching in general and designing culturally responsive SEL activities in particular. During middle meetings, practitioners and I iterated a co-designed culturally responsive teaching online course to address early meeting problems. During the later meetings, practitioners used tools they co-designed during the middle meetings to construct a CR-SEL design map to use for the 2021-2022 school year. I created five categories to explain the kinds of problems practitioners described concerning CR-SEL, and I showed how collective problems manifested as primary and secondary contradictions.