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Throughout the U.S., school district leaders have been facing challenges with students’ engagement, driven in part by the disconnect between students’ experiences at school vs. in their homes and communities. One way to create learning environments that resonate more with students’ lived experiences may be to focus on the overlap across students’ personal and social identities, which is key to their social and emotional well-being. In particular, students’ ethnic and racial identity (ERI) sits at the intersection between their personal and social worlds. The transformative Social Emotional Learning (tSEL) framework explicitly recognizes the importance of ERI, and tSEL can be used to help promote educational equity given that supporting students’ ERI can yield broad and long-term benefits for youth. This paper reviews developmental research on ERI, describes the tSEL framework, and features the Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards, which seek to narrow achievement gaps by ensuring that educators are prepared to support and to empower students from diverse backgrounds. In our view, such standards can serve as a mechanism for implementing the tSEL framework. We provide examples of sociocultural approaches that can be applied in developmental ways within classrooms and schools. The paper concludes with future directions for education policy and implementation.
Radulescu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.