Social and Emotional Learning and Early Childhood Education: Redundant terms?

Abstract

Social and emotional learning is a young field, but a very old concept. The idea that children require explicit instruction in social-emotional capacities is present in the writings of philosophers as far back as Plato, and partly constitutes the roots of the “whole-child development” and “developmentally appropriate practice” frameworks in early childhood education today. Nevertheless, early childhood education has recently been embracing and embraced by the modern global social and emotional learning movement in compulsory school education. Why would early childhood education do this, given its long tradition of prioritizing social-emotional pursuits and, in fact, serving as a model for the rest of the education continuum? Using Minow’s “dilemma of difference” framework, this article critically examines the question of which set of consequences the early childhood education field should choose in the current era—those of potentially superficially modularizing social-emotional concerns and comingling them with undesirable compulsory school education accountability structures, or those of continuing an embedded approach within a potentially generic whole-child philosophy that is difficult to implement in the real world. After considering early childhood education’s challenges with living by its own philosophy, the authors recommend a cautious but proactive acceptance of new social and emotional learning models within early childhood education because this allows a public interrogation of whichever values and methods for imparting them are chosen. The authors argue that an active alignment around social and emotional learning may buffer the early childhood education principles of democracy and child agency against the marginalization from political cross-currents they have historically experienced.