Transporting School-Based Preventive Social Emotional Learning Interventions Across Countries and Continents: Prospects and Perils

Introduction: School-based strategies to promote children’s social-emotional learning (SEL) and prevent behavioral and mental health problems have evolved in the U.S. (CASEL reference) and are growing in Europe and internationally (Sherman 2011). A recent meta-analysis of U.S. programs (Durlak et al., 2011) clearly establishes a solid evidence base for their efficacy. To date, randomized trials of school-based SEL interventions are much less common in Europe and quite rare in low- and middle- income countries throughout the world.

Methods, Results, Conclusions: First, this paper will describe the nature and scope of SEL initiatives in countries around the globe. We find that initiatives that target many of the same or similar skills and dispositions as “SEL” go by other names in other nations, including citizenship, values, peace, multi-cultural, human rights, life skills and humanitarian education. The aims of some of these initiatives are often narrower than SEL initiatives in the U.S., but they share SEL’s call to expand the role of formal education beyond academics and into SEL promotion and problem behavior prevention. Second, the paper will explore how the variability and complexity of the global landscape of school-based SEL-related initiatives presents significant challenges to preventive interventionists and prevention scientists who wish to “transport” interventions across countries and cultures. These challenges will be illustrated and discussed via a case description of the design and implementation of a large cluster randomized trial of school-based SEL policy and programming in three war-affected eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo  - an initiative which drew on both prior work on school-based SEL in other post-conflict societies, as well as on the robust evidence-base on SEL in the U.S.  The discussion examines implications for (bidirectional) ‘transportation’ of research and intervention knowledge between countries, considering how prevention trials in low income countries may benefit prevention research and policy in the US, as well as vice versa.