Social-Emotional Competence: Meaning and Its Relevance

Abstract

The increasing complexity of modern society, particularly in the wake of challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the importance of social-emotional competence among secondary school students. Adolescents today are navigating an environment filled with new pressures and sources of stress, impacting their psychological, emotional, and social well-being that can adversely affect their academic learning and professional growth. Social-emotional competence encompasses a range of skills essential for effective interpersonal interactions and personal growth. National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) India also supports the need for Social-Emotional Competence (SEC) to be incorporated into the school curriculum because these competencies are essential for personal and academic growth. Acquiring social-emotional competence is pivotal, which collectively leads to the formation of healthy perspectives. Despite the growing interest in Social Emotional Learning Programs, a comprehensive theoretical framework specifically tailored to integrate existing SEC models with neurological insights for adolescent curriculum development in contexts like India remains underexplored. This gap hinders the development of accessible and effective integrated SEC guidelines for educators. The absence of a robust theoretical model that can inform the development of integrated social-emotional learning guidelines for teachers, moving beyond standalone workshops, represents a significant gap that this paper seeks to address. The challenge seen is that most of the teachers being aware of social-emotional learning but not being able to integrate their learnings into their regular lessons or activities. This theoretical paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel, adapted framework for social-emotional competence that integrates established psychological models with recent neurological insights, thereby providing a robust theoretical foundation for curriculum development aimed at fostering SEC among secondary school students.