"Move, play, regulate": A critical ethnography of a community-based SEL curriculum's transformative implications at a low-income public elementary school

As trauma-informed and socioemotional learning (SEL) continues to gain traction in public schools (Cipriano, 2019), studies emerge to attend to the growing critiques related to the absence of systemic racism and other oppressive structures as part of this curriculum (Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Simmons, 2019). The context of this study includes the dual crisis of a pandemic and the intensification of economic, health, and educational turmoil as well as continued state-sanctioned murder of Black and Brown bodies (Dunn et al., 2021). This critical ethnography conducted in the 2020-2021 school year, explores, and analyzes the possibilities and challenges of an equity centered, transformative SEL program as it is implemented in an urban Oklahoma public elementary school. With the inclusion of Abolition Teaching Network (ATN)'s SEL tenets to this curriculum (2020) and ongoing conversations on abolition and culturally responsive-sustaining educational practices, this study offers educators, principals, and those in and outside the classroom competing and simultaneously employed frameworks for implementing transformative SEL. These frameworks inform not only further research on the possibilities and limitations to SEL in the school setting, but it also introduces key lessons for future consideration. After an eight-month study which included virtual and in-person classroom observations, interviews, survey data, and artifacts, two major themes were identified. The first was competing frameworks of 'safety' at the schoolwide level. The second was expanding on the theme of safety by interrogating 'belonging' and community building efforts both virtually and when students returned to in-person learning. Ultimately, this study adds a practical and theoretical component to conversations and efforts around SEL, trauma-informed pedagogies and the school-to-prison nexus

“Counterstory Mapping Our City”: Teachers Reckoning with Latinx Students’ Knowledges, Cultures, and Communities

The study focuses on a two-week unit with 90 students at an urban, Latinx-serving charter middle and high school in the south midwestern U.S. to create digital counterstory maps. The maps then served as the organizing content for a subsequent week-long summer professional development the authors led for their teachers. Analysis suggests the significance of engaging the students’ counterstories and cultural knowledge for designing teacher education committed to culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP). Further, it articulates the challenges for engaging CSP with students and teachers in a charter school context in which disciplinary and curricular mandates conflate cultural assimilation with academic achievement

Beyond Defeat : Understanding Educators’ Experiences in the 2018 Oklahoma Walkouts

As a research team, we collected 40 oral history interviews with teachers and support professionals across the state who meaningfully participated in the 2018 Oklahoma education walkouts. The teachers and staff we interviewed are voices not previously cited in local or national news or would be identified readily as prominent or powerful leaders in the strike -- they are everyday folks, like many of the co-authors, whose vision and critical labor made the strike happen. Our collective analysis illuminates the limits in framing the event narrowly in terms of win-lose or as an anomalous event that began overnight with a statewide Facebook group in March and ended April 12th, when schools reopened. Instead, we draw from our interviews to suggest a framing that centers a constructively critical and in-depth understanding of what educators, students, and their communities collectively began and continue to learn and create in preparation for, during, and in the afterlife of the strike. At the same time, we work to understand in our analysis when and how such collective grassroots work was stalled or challenged. Further, we suggest analyses of the historic event should be more discerning of who speaks for the state’s educators and, alternatively, whose voices and perspectives exist only at the margins of the public record, if at all