When SEL Travels: Translation, Visibility, and Power in the Global South

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.