Unruly affect in the kindergarten classroom: A critical analysis of social-emotional learning

Abstract

This article offers a critique of social-emotional learning programs through the lens of psychoanalytic theory and with a particular focus on the theoretical contributions of Kleinian psychoanalysis. In particular, the article draws on concepts of affective positions to show that social-emotional learning is mired in a paranoid-schizoid mentality that does not allow for ambivalence or exploration of disappointment. The article contends that social-emotional learning offers a rendition of learning that makes too little space for negative affect and difficult feelings, including aggression and excitement, in the early childhood classroom. After reviewing literature about social-emotional learning, showing the importance in social-emotional learning discourse of positive affect, the regulated self, and the managed classroom, the article explicates the concepts of paranoid-schizoid and depressive functioning, showing what the depressive position in particular might imply for learning and classroom relationships. The article draws on three vignettes from a qualitative research project in a public kindergarten classroom, theorizing these vignettes via a psychoanalytic lens. It argues for the importance of making space for negative affect, aggression, and awareness of the body in the classroom, showing how working with and through these phenomena allows for creativity and learning.

Introduction: “I’m sorry that you bothered me”

Lara, (all names used in this paper are pseudonyms), the kindergarten teacher, begins singing a song about counting to 100, and several children softly join in as they relinquish their free play and move toward the rug for morning meeting. A few children linger an extra minute with their Legos, then begin dismantling towers and joining the rest of their class. At another table, Sayeh hastily puts finishing touches on a drawing she has been laboring over quite gradually for the past 15 minutes. In the corner, Aiden walks up to Ariel and shoves him. Ariel stares, and Aiden shoves him again. The second time, Lara notices and crouches next to the two boys while other kids take their seats. Lara addresses Aiden: “Aiden, what did you want Ariel to do?” Both boys stare at her. Lara asks again: “I saw that you were pushing Ariel. Is there something you were hoping he would do?” Now, the boys make eye contact with each other, and Aiden says softly: “I want him to move. That’s my spot.” Lara nods: “Can you use your words to ask him that, to ask him to move somewhere different?” Aiden looks to the floor, knotting his fingers: “Can you move to another spot? That’s my spot.” Aiden kicks the ground. From his seat, Ariel kicks the ground as well and tucks both hands beneath his waistband. He nods and moves over, Aiden quickly sitting in the spot Ariel vacated.

Lara turns her attention to Ariel: “Did it bother you, Ariel, that Aiden touched you?” Ariel stares at her, expressionless. Lara repeats: “Did it bother you when he touched your body? When he pushed you instead of using words?” Ariel continues staring, and Lara asks him: “What can you do to let him know that bothered you?” Ariel looks at Aiden and says loudly: “I’m sorry.”

Lara asks one more time: “What can you do, Ariel, to tell him that he bothered you?”

“I’m sorry,” Ariel whispers this time. “I’m sorry that you bothered me.”

This anecdote, with its confused conflict and confusing apology, takes place in a classroom where the teacher is working according to the Responsive Classroom framework. Responsive Classroom is among the more ubiquitous of social-emotional learning (SEL) programs. This article contends that SEL programming offers an unspoken theory of learning that privileges positive affect and compliance, teaching that hard feelings ought to be quickly and neatly resolved. The article will further argue that SEL sets up an artificial boundary between students and teachers, positioning teachers as subjects who know what it is to have appropriate emotional and social reactions and students as those who must be taught. In the anecdote above, it is in fact unclear whether the two boys feel upset by their conflict or whether their teacher is intervening only to garner the end that her training has shown her is appropriate. ¹ The SEL-imbued language Lara uses to construct an artificial sequence of reparation ends up forcing both boys into articulating feelings they may or may not be experiencing.

This article reports on research in a kindergarten classroom using SEL programming as a significant part of the curriculum. The research aims to address the question of what becomes of children’s negative feelings, experiences, and relationships under the sometimes oppressive “hegemonic positivity” (Stearns, 2015) of Responsive Classroom and other SEL programs, and what happens to learning and relationships as a result. The article relies on a psychoanalytic framework for understanding more deeply the emotional processes occurring during these sequences, focusing specifically on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein to help interpret vignettes from the research. Klein’s theory offers a window into just what relational, creative, and educational opportunities get lost when the early childhood classroom aims insistently on ensuring the omnipresence of a specific version of happiness and of what it means to act and think.

Following a description of the methodology, a review of the literature around SEL in elementary education, demonstrating the abiding emphasis on circumscribed “prosocial” language and behavior as well as positive affect in schools, is provided. The article proceeds with an overview of Kleinian theory on affective positions. Offering two further vignettes, the article considers the different ways SEL and psychoanalysis might approach these vignettes. While SEL is important for its reification of emotional classroom life, its underlying assumptions foreclose creativity, learning, and relationships. A psychoanalytic model would allow teachers and children to address unruly and negative affect mutually, constructing a classroom environment where disappointments and constraints enable symbolization and learning.

Methodology

This research took place in a kindergarten class at an urban public school in the USA, where all of the teachers have extensive training in Responsive Classroom and are expected to apply the precepts of SEL to daily classroom life. Lara, the participating lead teacher, was in her 15th year teaching kindergarten at the same school and described herself in a casual preliminary conversation as “transformed” by Responsive Classroom. She received her first SEL training eight years prior to this study and attended regular workshops on Responsive Classroom programs and practices. Lara’s classroom had only three explicit rules, which they referred to as their guidelines. These rules, generated in tandem with the students via a process prescribed by Responsive Classroom, were: “Respect ourselves. Respect each other. Respect our environment.” Over the course of the observations, Lara directed students’ attention repeatedly to these guidelines, which were posted on a classroom wall with the children’s versions of their signatures. The classroom rules, school, and classroom routines, and sociopolitical events superficially external to the classroom, obviously impacted students’ behavior and experiences; analyzing the details of these interactions is beyond the scope of this article.

There were 19 students in the classroom; of these students, 15 children took part in the study. These students gave oral assent and their parents gave written consent for their participation. Parent consent forms were sent home in students’ backpacks and returned to the teachers. Once the parents had consented, the researcher approached individual children to obtain oral assent for participation. The teacher and assistant teacher also gave written consent. The researcher spent approximately 20 hours in the classroom over the course of 5 months. Observations occurred once a week in one-to-two-hour blocks, during times agreed to by the classroom teacher. Children who were present in the class but whose parents did not consent to participation were not documented in notes.

In part because of confidentiality issues that the school principal felt should not be breached for the purposes of the study, and in part in an effort to focus on the moment-to-moment experience and activity of the classroom, the study did not involve collection of demographic data from the participating children or families. This is not out of a sense that race, culture, gender, language background, or socio-economics are irrelevant or in some way transcended when talking about the emotional life of classrooms. In fact, as the final anecdote shows, a desire to render cultural difference either lovely or somehow insignificant is one of the problems with SEL. However, it was outside the scope of this study to explore these categories of identity with children, and parental self-identity might only confound the meaning of, for instance, culture or socio-economic status in a child’s life.

Social-emotional learning

From its codification as an educational concept in the early 1990s, SEL’s proponents have repeatedly defined it in terms of “the development of positive, constructive life paths for children and youth” (Elias et al., 1997: 6). A number of conceptual articles argue that SEL programs will help children not only behave better, but also feel better (e.g. Devaney, 2005). Bird and Sultmann (2010) contend that SEL can help students feel more well liked and appreciate others more. Sheras and Bradshaw (2011) argue that policies should enforce SEL programming in schools so that all students will feel better during their education. Program evaluation literature also addresses students’ feelings and attitudes in school, valorizing programs causally linked to decreased reports of student anger and increased positive feelings about school (e.g. Frey et al., 2005; Merrell et al., 2008; Pahl and Barrett, 2007; Smith et al., 2016).

Kristjansson (2006) was perhaps the first to launch an explicit critique not just of one SEL program or implementation strategy, but of the premises underlying SEL. Kristjansson argues that SEL places an excess of emphasis on success and offers an insufficient understanding of ethics. Hoffman (2009) is also critical of SEL. After reviewing literature published for practitioners, she argues that SEL is in some ways ideologically manipulative and instrumentalist because of its palpable desire to create better and more cheerful citizens. Hoffman believes that SEL constructs emotion as a tool to be used for the management of concrete behaviors and pursuit of academic achievement, possibly to the detriment of moral life in schools.

For the most part, the literature about SEL conveys that positive affect is desirable and schools should teach prosocial behavior. A few critical voices have probed these assumptions but stop short of articulating alternative visions for the emotional life of classrooms. The next section of this article offers an overview of an aspect of psychoanalytic theory that helps understand what can happen in SEL and points toward a different way for thinking about both affect and behavior in schools.

Kleinian affective positions

This section presents Melanie Klein’s theory about affective positions with the aim of foregrounding how a Kleinian theoretical stance might enrich interpretations of the emotional life of classrooms. Klein theorized two major affective positions that people move through iteratively over the course of the life span: the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. In education, where we are so accustomed to thinking in terms of stage theories of development (e.g. Silin, 1995), it is tempting to understand the affective positions as stages to be moved through sequentially. Instead, though, the affective positions as Klein considers them are necessarily repeated throughout life. While both positions have their roots in the bodily experiences of infancy, contemporary followers of Kleinian thought move away from bodily depictions and describe the experiences of infancy as metaphors (Shafer, 1994). There is utility for education both in Klein’s original bodily formulation of the affective positions, if one is willing to remain open to its provocative claims, and in its more contemporary metaphoric understanding.

According to Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position has its roots in the earliest months of life, when the infant is preoccupied by a constant need for feeding and by uncomfortable corporeal experiences. During this time, the infant develops a sense that there is good and bad available in the world. Good is being fed and physically soothed; bad is being denied food and experiencing physical discomfort. Out of these bodily experiences develops a psychic state characterized by “splitting, idealization, and projective identification” (Steiner, 1987: 69). In this position, the subject feels a pervasive “persecutory anxiety” (Shafer, 2016: 412) because of a sense that there are bad things poised to deny both needs and pleasures. Simultaneously, the paranoid-schizoid position is one in which the subject believes in ideal objects that will work to ensure comfort. Importantly, the paranoid-schizoid position is not inevitably pathological (Steiner, 1987: 70). Indeed, this sense of persecution and the search for what is ideal can be catalyzing in relational and learning contexts. At the same time, the individual in the paranoid-schizoid position must exert a great deal of effort at all times (69). Klein (1996: 273) believed that the individual rooted inertly in the paranoid-schizoid position is so defensive as to circumvent learning, for that which is new or unfamiliar might be bad and ought to be warded off.

A version of the paranoid-schizoid position might be read into the anecdote at the opening of this article. Both Aiden and Ariel seem to feel persecuted in this situation: Aiden by Ariel, who took his spot, and Ariel by Aiden, who shoved him. It is possible that both children feel persecuted by Lara, who is intent on intervening, and simultaneously behave as though they believe she is good and her answers must be right. The boys respond quickly to Lara’s guidance for making amends, but they do not appear to release their guardedness in relation to either their teacher or each other. Neither child is willing to regard the other’s frame of reference, and neither appears interested in rendering himself open to learning from Lara’s guidance in the situation.

The individual in the depressive position, according to Klein, sees that the ideal and persecutory others of paranoid-schizoid mentality may in fact be aspects of one whole object. For Klein, when the infant enters the depressive position, he (sic) realizes that his mother is not an amalgam of his own idealized and persecutory experience, but rather an entire person; moreover, she is a person about whom he has engaged in anxious and hostile fantasies. The infant releases some of the anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid position. The guilt that arises as a result, in part, of previous aggressive fantasies leads to a reparative impulse. In the depressive position, the acceptance of the world’s disappointments enables not only love and forgiveness, but also ambivalence and acceptance of the real. “These changes,” Steiner (1987: 69) writes, “result from an increased capacity to integrate experiences”; good and bad are no longer polarized or even separated. Steiner further explains: “The consequences include a development of symbolic function” (69). The capacity to symbolize, understood in simple terms as the ability to represent in thought, language, art, and other forms of expression something which is not immediately present or part of the self, is intertwined with the ability to learn. It is only by rendering anxiety, fear, and guilt symbolic—in the form of play, writing, drawing, or cultural participation—that the individual can tolerate them.

In the opening vignette, it is the scene in which the children make the possibly laden and ambivalent decision to relinquish block towers and hurriedly finish artwork so that they might join in the class that represents the depressive position. For these children in this particular moment, the teacher and the routines are neither persecutory nor ideal. They must be tolerated, but this toleration grows out of a series of internal compromises children make, in part to reap the benefits of participation in communal life and the satisfaction that comes out of a sense of maturity and devotion to the other.

SEL programs are rooted in a paranoid-schizoid sensibility, one in which the antisocial is equated with the bad and the prosocial is idealized. With its demands for positive feelings and its heavy valuation of the regulated self, SEL enacts a defense against unruly affect, institutionalizing the anxiety surrounding this phenomenon. In occupying the paranoid-schizoid position, SEL does something very important. It reifies a sense of what is manageable and even good about existence within the self or among others. Establishing an idealized frame is important as a way of maintaining trust in the world. Further, the extraordinary rejection of angry or antisocial impulses that occurs with SEL might catalyze exploration of these impulses in the self and the disappointments they engender when faced with both internally and externally imposed limits.

However, SEL makes no move toward the depressive position, which would require working with or through these possibilities toward understanding the roles of frustration, disappointment, and anger in day-to-day life. Instead, SEL remains mired in an idealized/persecutory stance: negative affect and unruly impulses must be taught away from. SEL demands superficial, even nonsensical, restitution—“I’m sorry you bothered me”—at the cost of exploring ambivalence and genuine sources of conflict, as if all conflict were simply a matter of misunderstanding rather than opposing justified wants and needs. As in the opening vignette, the need for a quick resolution to a conflict forecloses conversation among children, as well as between children and adults; it also seemed to generate confusion or shame about angry and aggressive impulses, and a sense that compliance was what was required.

A version of this incident that moved willingly toward the depressive or between the two affective positions would allow the children to name and possibly stay with their real anger toward one another. It is, of course, impossible to know the multiplicity of motivations for the boys’ argument. Perhaps they, like their peers, are disappointed that the morning’s free play is ending; maybe they are exhausted; or maybe something happened between or to them before school even started. Untangling, rather than glossing over or repressing, these motivations would allow the participants to gradually come to see one another more fully, and acknowledge their own ambivalences toward self and other.

Revisiting the SEL-managed classroom

Here, two further vignettes from observations are offered. The stories are told as isolated anecdotes and cannot function as windows into these children’s psyches. Interpretations consider how a psychoanalytic approach might offer opportunities for learning and relating that become foreclosed in part because of the paranoid-schizoid nature of SEL discourse. The children in these anecdotes are named with pseudonyms, and overtly identifying information has been removed.

Of course, the selection of only two additional vignettes is potentially methodologically problematic. However, limiting the selection of vignettes for presentation allows a deeper theoretical interpretation of what they portray. These interpretations are by no means the only ones available. This article contends that these vignettes further elucidate SEL’s deep entrenchment in the paranoid-schizoid position by illustrating strong defenses against both negative and otherwise unruly affect, and by showing how teacher-directed positivity can foreclose meaningfully creative and ambivalent relationships in the classroom.

“That’s how giraffes kiss”: effacement of the body

The day’s line leader always gets to choose the greeting; this involves selecting what language the classmates greet each other in and choosing a gesture they should use as they go around the circle. Theodore says he would like to say “Hola” and wants the children to greet each other by touching neck to neck. Lara hesitates: “That’s a tricky one, touching necks. I wonder if maybe some kids might not feel comfortable.” Many children in the class nod at each other and Ava offers: “We feel comfortable!” Lara continues: “Well maybe … I wonder if everyone would feel comfortable. Let’s … let’s try something else. Maybe elbows or knees or toes.”

Jasmine puts her hand in the air and begins waving it around. Theodore shrugs: “Knees, I guess.” Jasmine jumps up and waves her hand desperately; Lara asks: “Is this an emergency, Jasmine?” Jasmine shakes her head. David interjects: “I have an emergency because I can’t do the greeting if it’s knees.” He rolls up the leg of his pants to reveal an enormous wound with a bit of blood trickling out. “David!” Lara exclaims. “David, you need a Band-Aid!”

Jasmine still has her hand in the air, and Lara tells the class: “Jasmine has been holding something in her brain for a long time. Let’s give Jasmine a chance to share.” Jasmine stands again, bouncing on one foot. She says: “Neck touches are giraffe kisses.” She pauses dramatically. “I know,” she continues, “because we went to my aunt’s house in Las Vegas and … and she said … she said neck touches are giraffe kisses and she said that was her favorite kind of kiss.”

There is a moment of silence, then Lara says: “Oh, Jasmine, I’m so glad you shared this because I can really picture it. I am thinking about two beautiful, tall giraffes … maybe they are a mother and her child, and they have their necks, and they are touching each other and bent into each other.” Lara stretches her hands into the air and holds a dreamy expression on her face.

The students are quiet for a few moments and then Jasmine continues: “No.” She punches a fist into the air: “That’s not how it goes, it’s not like that.” Lara looks at her quizzically and she raises both arms up, standing again and aggressively knocking her forearms into each other: “The giraffes are kissing and it’s like this, and they also do this too.” She punches her fists together, grunting softly and cracking her knuckles.

Lara takes a deep breath: “Oh. Oh, thank you … for showing us, Jasmine.”

Ariel is on all fours, rocking slowly back and forth, and Ava speaks up: “Reed is putting his hands in his pants.”

Lara asks: “Is that bothering you? Where do you think he should put his hands?”

“In his lap,” Ava says firmly.

“Can you tell him that?” Lara asks, and Ava complies: “Reed, please put your hands in your lap.”

Lara looks at Reed: “Reed, do you need to use the bathroom, kiddo?” Reed shakes his head, puts his hands in his lap, and Lara instructs the class to sit cross-legged and turn to read the morning message.

The children in this classroom are hoping to touch one another, to explore their own and each other’s bodies, and to talk about what they know and wonder. SEL frameworks offer little guidance for teachers, who must truck with complex and frenzied sociocultural messages about children’s bodies and how they bear on classroom life (e.g. Tobin, 2007). A search for the term “body” on the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (2016) and Responsive Classroom (2016) websites yields only results about keeping bodies physically safe and making sure children exercise.

The activity in the vignette above is the students’ daily greeting. Responsive Classroom (2007: 15) stipulates that “[t]he purposes of the greeting component [of the daily morning meeting] are to … use everyone’s name and to become friendly caretakers who greet and welcome everyone to the room.” The greeting should further “set a positive tone for the day … provide a sense of recognition and belonging … [and] let children practice hospitality” (16). The Responsive Classroom (2016) website cautions that teachers should be “concerned about greetings becoming silly,” advising that “it helps to focus on engagement rather than entertainment or frivolity.”

How is the teacher to understand, however, the line between children’s often deeply embodied excitement and the ostensible problem of frivolity? What is it that educators seek to defend against when they ward off frivolity? When Jasmine, Reed, and others in the giraffe vignette grow mutually excited and stimulated, when David is reminded of the startling wound on his knee, when the children protest collectively that they ought to be allowed to touch one another’s necks, and when Reed puts his hand down his pants, there is a group sense of bodily excitement that the rigors of SEL require be tamped down in order that the day start with a “positive” but carefully controlled tone.

Lara’s interpretation of Jasmine’s excited anecdote constitutes an idealized vision constructed out of a much more complex reality. Jasmine describes a version of giraffe touch tinged with aggression, sexuality, and excitement; Lara recreates the story in terms of a romantic vision of a mother and her child. SEL’s effacement of the body’s complexities makes it nearly unthinkable for a teacher to wonder alongside students what excitement, touch, and physical experience are all about. When SEL idealizes “self awareness, social awareness, responsible decision making, self management, [and] relationship management” (Zins et al., 2007: 195), it defends heavily against the unregulated self who might act out of excitement, and make irresponsible decisions perhaps fueled by bodily impulses and behavior that longs to escape management.

It is not the case that children should be allowed to move through their school day with their hands in their pants, nor should they necessarily be given the opportunity to touch necks together. It is worth questioning why these prohibitions exist and what excitement about learning they might circumvent, but their existence is not the primary problem here. Movement toward the depressive position sometimes involves accepting limits. In fact, the often maddening nature of limits is what causes people to feel the very disappointment in the other that allows us acceptance of each other as whole and complicated people. Further, in coping with limits, children can find ways to imagine, create, and symbolize that allow for a richer experience of learning.

When SEL programming cautions against excessive excitement and renders the body a separate, taboo part of the self, it is superficially helping the teacher, who is tasked with containing the unconscious fantasy worlds of many children all at once. SEL is appealing in this way; it offers a framework for developing regulation that can seem necessary when children come together in a potentially overstimulating group. Yet its disavowal of the body and all that is negative, complex, or exciting within it causes SEL to work counter to its own stated aim of enhancing learning. Psychoanalysis helps explain that it is not by repressing or ignoring the body that learning becomes possible; instead, learning happens as the body and its vicissitudes get worked through in the individual and in relation to others (Britzman, 2009; Taubman, 2012). This does not necessarily mean talking explicitly about giraffe, or other, sexuality with children, but it means acknowledging the loss, anger, and ambivalence that can come along with developing regulation. Perhaps outside of the strictures of SEL and the tremendous anxiety about what is “frivolous” and uncontained, Lara could talk with children openly about their wishes and disappointments in the moment. In the depressive position, anger, sometimes about limits, and its attendant guilt enable the individual to develop a reparative capacity. If children have to ward off the anger in the first place, such development and communication becomes foreclosed, and they lose the opportunity to practice symbolizing their experience.

“Did you know that about yourself?”: Transference and internal objects

After the day’s greeting, Lara introduces a game called “Have you seen my sheep?” Lara will describe a child in three different ways; the class is meant to guess which child she is referring to. Lara describes three children and the class is enjoying the game greatly. Lara moves to her fourth child: “His family is from Cameroon.” The rest of the class starts pointing at Bernie and he fidgets in his seat. “He has a twin brother … He likes math materials.”

“It’s Bernie!” several of the kids call out. Lara says: “Well, let’s see. Is it Bernie?” Bernie is grinning enormously. “Do you have a twin brother?” Lara asks. Bernie nods and bends and straightens twice in a row. “Is your family from Cameroon, Bernie?” Bernie stands rigidly and does not answer; he is no longer smiling. Lara persists: “Your family is from Cameroon, Bernie. What part of the world is that in?”

Bernie answers: “You can’t walk there.”

Lara moves to retrieve a globe from the top of a bookcase and brings it over to Bernie. She puts her arm around his shoulder and holds him close, so that they can gaze upon the globe together. The rest of the class seems disengaged; children begin rolling on the floor and whispering to one another. Lara asks again: “Do you know what part of the world Cameroon is in? It’s in Africa … let’s see if we can find it.” Still touching Bernie, Lara spins the globe.

Bernie looks up at Lara and then down to his feet and says: “I have a rocket at home.” Lara interjects: “Here it is, Bernie! This is the beautiful country where your family comes from.” Bernie turns toward the rest of the class. “I’m gonna blast off and go out of my house,” he tells them, then looks down at his feet. “I’m going to knock down my house with that rocket ship.”

Lara steps back and looks at him: “I wonder if you could draw about one at choice time. Kindergartners, look at Bernie’s face, he is so excited. Look into my eyes, Bernie. Do you know what language they speak in Cameroon? Your parents speak it.” Bernie is silent, but his silence is barely noticeable given the intensity of the whispering and giggling happening around him. “It’s French,” Lara whispers, somehow reverently. “Your parents speak French.” Lara clears her throat: “Do you love math materials?”

Bernie answers: “No, I love ice cream! Ice cream cones!”

“But at choice time,” Lara continues, “you like to play with math materials. You love them. Did you know that about yourself?”

Bernie looks at his classmates again. “I went to the store to buy giant watermelons!” he explains, and Lara asks the children to turn to face the easel.

Observing this vignette, it was difficult to tell what Lara was wishing to accomplish with Bernie, or what Bernie was communicating with his teacher and his classmates. Lara appears to be teaching Bernie a particular way to feel about himself. She tells him about himself and puts her own language to his affect, explaining that his family is from a beautiful country, for instance, and telling the class that he is excited. Meanwhile, Bernie seems to move away from Lara’s direction. From Lara’s side, the conversation is about globes and geography, language and culture. She may also be enacting a vision of the good teacher who embraces multiculturalism in a particular way, dealing with difference by naming it summarily beautiful. From Bernie’s side, they are talking about transportation, aggression, and explosion, about sensuous experiences and desires like ice cream and watermelons.

Lara has shown on multiple occasions that she considers it important to attend to children’s individuality. Why, then, in this vignette, does she seem so intent on pushing the interaction in a particular direction, especially when Bernie is manifestly resistant? One possibility has to do with the tremendous anxiety SEL imbues regarding negative affect. Those who argue for standardization of SEL emphasize that “the front line for efforts to address children’s social-emotional needs systematically is public education” (Elias et al., 2003: 306). Currently, the culture of public school, according to these authors, leads them to function as “incubators of anxiety, insecurity and maltreatment” (307). The SEL teacher, then, is mandated with quickly moving children away from the aforementioned anxiety and insecurity. To do this, she must enforce good feelings, high self-esteem, and even cultural pride, whether or not a child is interested in any particular moment.

Again, it is SEL’s situation in the paranoid-schizoid position that makes it seem impossible to let a child like Bernie experience complicated feelings about his origins and identity. His own feelings about the language his parents speak—the extent to which he wishes to discuss that this morning at all—become irrelevant to the teacher tasked with enforcing positive affect. It is possible that Lara, an experienced teacher, sees how important it feels to Bernie to think about other things; she does, after all, invite him to bring his rocket ship to the writing workshop. Hopefully, this will give Bernie a chance to symbolize some of the anxiety engendered by this unusual encounter with his teacher. However, glossing over the complexities Bernie brings contributes to a sense that children ought to embrace idealized relationships to their own identities and the teacher should ward off the intrusive persecution of embarrassment, confusion, excitement, avoidance, or any of the many emotional responses Bernie might be trying on.

A move toward depressive functioning in this vignette would require Lara to relinquish her mandate for positivity and instead attend to Bernie’s ambivalence. It is not that Bernie should never face encouragement to feel positive about his cultural heritage, but to enforce these feelings is to ironically invalidate his experience and subjectivity. Bernie may well find Cameroon beautiful and just not want to talk about it this morning; the point is that a pedagogy which demands positive affect on a particular time scale pushes teachers and children further away from each other and leaves little space to think together through the meaning in negative, anxious, or simply other feelings. To engage what is not ineffably positive, especially about living amid difference, might be uncomfortable. Yet perhaps the most insidious implication of SEL is the idea that school and learning ought to be comfortable.

Conclusion

This study has a number of significant limitations. The research took place in only one classroom, and while the article analyzes SEL discourse around a variety of programs and theories, the empirical work touches only on the Responsive Classroom program. The teacher, school, and children are all, of course, specific, and their behaviors cannot be generalized to make broad statements about how SEL pans out in all classrooms. The study is also arguably methodologically limited in that it works only with three vignettes; in pursuing interpretive depth, it sacrifices breadth of reported data. Another limitation of the study is the fact that the researcher had only observational knowledge of the children and the teacher; future similar work would do well to include teacher and student interviews to garner subjects’ own interpretations of the material. Along these lines, it would be interesting and important for future qualitative studies on SEL to take into account the relationship between classroom demographics—culture, gender, language, socio-economics, and disability diagnoses, among others—and the way SEL pans out in a particular environment. Though the decision not to consider these variables was intentional in this study, it does ultimately present a limitation in how deeply and complexly the findings can be interpreted.

Despite these limitations, this study is significant for its unique critique of the premises underlying SEL and its argument that Kleinian psychoanalytic theory offers insight into alternate approaches to affective classroom life. SEL posits a relationship between emotion and learning that implies the importance of sublimating negative affect and difficult feelings in order for learning to take place. This position signifies SEL’s inertia in the paranoid-schizoid position, in which there are wholly good and bad ways of being and the individual must exert tremendous effort to fend off anxieties about persecutory objects and feelings. A depressive framework suggests a more complex relationship, in which the unruly and the negative must be brought to bear on the learning experience. Hard feelings, stimulation, and relational experience might be gradually worked through in order for curiosity to exist, children to understand ambivalence, symbolization to be rendered possible, and knowledge to be constructed or acquired. Psychoanalytic theory and practice suggest the import of the following sub-questions for any study looking to understand affective work in schools: What is made of unruly feelings, affects, and even behaviors in the context of this educational approach? Is there space for sustaining the negative and recognizing the importance of the depressive position in allowing for learning? Where is there room for the body and its potential metaphors in this program, and are children’s sexuality and aggression, as well as related disappointments, honored or disavowed?

There is a substantial need for further research on affective classroom life and particularly for qualitative accounts of teachers’ and children’s experience in SEL-managed classrooms. Such research should remain open to thinking critically about the premises underlying SEL. It would also be helpful to have qualitative accounts of classrooms that do not work with SEL but do make space for negative and unruly affect. What might we learn from the dynamics that ensue? What other theoretical lenses, besides Kleinian psychoanalysis, offer alternate visions of the relationship between affect and learning?

In many schools, including the one where Lara teaches, it is difficult to carve out time dedicated to working around children’s social and emotional worlds. This makes it doubly important that such time be considered carefully. The purpose of such time ought not be to squelch negative affect and excitement such that children are in a superficially positive frame that allows them to construct a veneer of readiness for learning. Instead, those of us interested in the lives of young children and their teachers might think about what we seek to ward off via such enactments and how we might instead bring these difficult constructs to the fore, letting them become part and parcel of our learning together.