Promoting equity through teacher practices: A scoping review on transformative social-emotional learning

Nymisha Yadati, Benny Thomas and Santhosh Kareepadath Rajan
CHRIST University, Bangalore, India

Literature on teachers' transformative social-emotional learning (TSEL) is emerging and focuses on improving teachers' competency in delivering and implementing equity-focused SEL among students. Our study is a scoping review aiming to understand the characteristics of existing literature regarding teachers' TSEL, identify gaps, and discuss future research directions. It follows JBI guidelines for a scoping review and the PRISMA-ScR method for screening the literature. A systematic search was conducted in eight databases, and eleven studies were identified. Our findings report the characteristics of the studies and explain related concepts. We found that teachers need to be engaged in transformative SEL education to implement TSEL among students and build healthy teacher-student bonds. Teachers need to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogies in SEL to cater for the needs of students from diverse communities. Stretching was identified as a strategy to integrate social justice issues into traditional SEL practices to make social-emotional learning transformative.
[ PDF full text for this article ]

Authors: Ms Nymisha Yadati (corresponding author) is a doctoral scholar in the School of Education at CHRIST University, Bangalore, India. She has an MA in Education from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad, India. Her research interests include social-emotional learning and educational psychology. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4913-1656 Email: nymisha.yadati@res.christuniversity.in Dr Benny Thomas is a Professor of Computer Science at CHRIST University, Bangalore, India. He has a doctoral degree in Education from CHRIST University. His interest areas include whole-person education, educational leadership, and educational administration. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8270-2553 Email: frbenny@christuniversity.in Dr Santhosh Kareepadath Rajan is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at CHRIST University, Bangalore, India, where he has been a faculty member since 2016. He completed his PhD at Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. Dr Santhosh has expertise in behavioural research methods and statistics, psychometrics, and structural equation modelling. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1423-5428 Email: santhosh.kr@christuniversity.in Please cite as: Yadati, N., Thomas, B. & Rajan, S. K. (2025). Promoting equity through teacher practices: A scoping review on transformative social-emotional learning. Issues in Educational Research, 35(1), 422-441. http://www.iier.org.au/iier35/yadati.pdf