When SEL Travels: Translation, Visibility, and Power in the Global South
Painel de Discussão | Online
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Organizado por:
Dream a Dream
Sobre o evento
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is increasingly embedded within education systems as a response to concerns around wellbeing, engagement, and social cohesion. Yet, as SEL enters systems through frameworks of evaluation and measurement, a critical question emerges: what becomes visible, valued, or rendered invisible when SEL is evaluated?
The panel’s primary exploration is: How does evaluation shape what counts as Social and Emotional Learning in education systems, and what becomes visible, valued, or invisible when SEL is measured in Global South contexts?
This panel is explicitly positioned from a Global South lens, centering contexts where education systems are shaped by historical inequalities, cultural plurality, and layered socio-political realities. It brings together practitioner-researchers to examine how SEL is understood, documented, and governed within public education systems. Rather than assuming a universal form of SEL, the panel interrogates how evaluation frameworks shape what counts as valid knowledge, often privileging standardized, comparable indicators while overlooking relational, contextual, and culturally embedded practices.
In Global South contexts, pedagogies of care, relational teaching, and community-based ways of engaging with emotions already exist but remain largely unrecognized within formal systems of evaluation. As a result, they are difficult to sustain and often rest disproportionately on teachers. The issue, therefore, is not whether SEL should be evaluated, but how systems decide what is worth measuring. Education systems tend to measure what they value but also come to value only what can be measured.
As data systems and artificial intelligence increasingly shape evaluation, these tensions intensify, risking forms of evidence that appear objective yet remain distanced from lived realities.
By centering practitioner-researchers, this panel positions the Global South not as a site of implementation but as a site of critique and knowledge production, calling for evaluation approaches that are contextual, relational, and grounded in practice.
The panel’s primary exploration is: How does evaluation shape what counts as Social and Emotional Learning in education systems, and what becomes visible, valued, or invisible when SEL is measured in Global South contexts?
This panel is explicitly positioned from a Global South lens, centering contexts where education systems are shaped by historical inequalities, cultural plurality, and layered socio-political realities. It brings together practitioner-researchers to examine how SEL is understood, documented, and governed within public education systems. Rather than assuming a universal form of SEL, the panel interrogates how evaluation frameworks shape what counts as valid knowledge, often privileging standardized, comparable indicators while overlooking relational, contextual, and culturally embedded practices.
In Global South contexts, pedagogies of care, relational teaching, and community-based ways of engaging with emotions already exist but remain largely unrecognized within formal systems of evaluation. As a result, they are difficult to sustain and often rest disproportionately on teachers. The issue, therefore, is not whether SEL should be evaluated, but how systems decide what is worth measuring. Education systems tend to measure what they value but also come to value only what can be measured.
As data systems and artificial intelligence increasingly shape evaluation, these tensions intensify, risking forms of evidence that appear objective yet remain distanced from lived realities.
By centering practitioner-researchers, this panel positions the Global South not as a site of implementation but as a site of critique and knowledge production, calling for evaluation approaches that are contextual, relational, and grounded in practice.
Orador/a
| Nome | Título | Biography |
|---|---|---|
| Ms. Sarah Khan | Founder & Principal, Sarah Khan Associates (Pvt) Ltd. | Sarah Khan is the Founder and Principal of Sarah Khan Associates, a Karachi-based behavioral systems and research translation firm. She has been working extensively in the field of social and emotional learning (SEL), with a focus on bridging research, practice, and policy in culturally diverse contexts. Her work sits at the intersection of research rigour, cultural relevance, and systems change, using SEL as a lever for human capital development. She currently serves as the Anchor Organisation Lead for the PSS-SEL Toolbox, an initiative of Harvard University’s EASEL Lab and INEE, where she leads the contextualisation of global SEL frameworks for South Asian settings. Grounded in the belief that frameworks developed in one context require systematic cultural adaptation before they can be meaningfully applied elsewhere, Sarah led the development of a behavioral assessment rubric over two and a half years. This work underpins a digital tool now used by over 13,000 users across five countries, and recognised as the Best Digital Product at GESS Dubai 2025. She also hosts The Translation Gap: When SEL Travels, a podcast that fosters cross-regional dialogue between Global South and Global North practitioners, exploring how SEL knowledge evolves across contexts, cultures, and power dynamics |
| Dr. Bhawana Shrestha | Co-founder, My Emotions Matter |
Moderators
| Nome | Título | Biography |
|---|---|---|
| Anagha C | Associate Manager, Research and Impact Assessment, Dream a Dream |