As a teacher perhaps it is not too surprising that today I was thinking about social emotional learning and how it connects to social justice. Social emotional learning, broken down to its component parts, is a process children and adults go through of developing self-awareness, awareness of others, and awareness of the relationships between people. Throughout the stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood, there are many distinct developments that happen, but that is the long and short of it. It often precedes empathy.

As it turns out, art can be an incredibly effective tool for helping to teach this. By connecting emotions with colors, figures, composition, and pattern, we can learn to recognize those emotions in ourselves. We can learn to recognize what causes them, and what soothes us when we need it. And we can even learn to recognize those same feelings in others.  

We have all had contentious conversations with someone, often a family member, about topics that to us seem obviously unjust but to them apparently seem par for the course and the way things should be. I once had a 3+ hour conversation during a car ride with a freshman year roommate (the son of a Russian immigrant who got mugged once in Baltimore on a pizza route) about why the statistics showing that black people are subject to more violence should not be interpreted as demonstrating that black people are more violent. At the end he said something like, "Zach, I appreciate that we could have such a level headed conversation about this, but despite your convincing arguments I still believe what I believe." I had enough privilege in that moment to stay in the car for the rest of the ride.

Now, I wasn't going to spend too much more of my time interacting with this guy than was absolutely necessary, and at 18 or 19 I think I really did give my best effort to demonstrate to him how his perspective was biased, but in retrospect I think more conversations about art might have been useful in gently nudging him toward more self-awareness. A simple statement like, in this painting, these colors make me feel angry; or, the composition of one figure standing over the other makes me feel frustrated at the imbalance; might have had a more significant long term impact. Certainly we should be making sure our young folks hear and participate in conversations like these so they can develop the tools to have more serious conversations about the state of their world and their position in it.  

As you read this week's Breathe post, I encourage you to ask yourself, how does this work make you feel? What does this particular word evoke? This line break, this color? And ask a friend or family member, too.  P.s. Here is a link to a video about SEL at the MoMA.