What is Social- Emotional Learning?
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which people acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
Why is Social Emotional Learning essential for power-based violence prevention?
All forms of power-based - sexual violence, racist violence, transphobia, homophobia- are learned behaviors. These behaviors are learned directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously from our families, peers, educators, spiritual leaders, and the media we consume. It is also sometimes a response to abuse, neglect, exclusion, alienation from one's community, having low self-worth, or the inability to handle emotions such as anger, frustration or sadness So, we could argue that if people can learn how to be violent, they can also learn to be nonviolent, right? But, how?
Social-emotional learning provides the skills, behaviors, and attitudes that all people need to have healthy and safe relationships with themselves and others. At Tulane, our power-based violence prevention techniques are grounded in several pillars of SEL-- building empathy, overcoming implicit and explicit bias, learning healthy relationship skills, creating strong communities of support, and developing of self-identification that affirm intrinsic value and dignity of self and others.
