Course Description:

This course explores research and strategies around topics of CASEL’s framework, self-regulation, prosocial behaviors, emotions, belonging, anti-bullying, and trauma-sensitive SEL. Course participants will be guided through an understanding of the research and asked to reflect on how this research informs their classroom practice. Students who complete the course have the option of completing an accompanying course for graduate credit.

Students will:

1. Identify frameworks of social emotional learning, including a study of CASL’s framework of social emotional learning.
2. Identify problematic biases in how we understand emotions and describe strategies that offer space for a diversity of cultural understandings of emotions.
3. Envision how music spaces might become spaces of inclusive belonging and affirmation.
4. Identify and describe findings from neuroscience and social psychology on how belonging is experienced and enacted in artistic spaces.
5. Describe research findings on bullying and imagine strategies to create anti-bullying spaces within music classrooms.
6. Describe how social emotional learning might be trauma-sensitive, engaging in polyvagal understandings of practices of co-regulation.

Your Instructor:

Kevin Shorner-Johnson is an international leader in the field of peacebuilding and music education. His work has been published in the Philosophy of Music Education Review, Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education, Journal of Medical Humanities, Music Educators Journal, International Journal of Music Education, and Advances in Music Education Research. Dr. Shorner-Johnson serves as Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Elizabethtown College and director of the Master of Music Education degree program in peacebuilding, SEL, world music drumming, and trauma-informed practice. In 2018, Dr. Shorner-Johnson was named a "Peacemaker in our Midst" by the World Affairs Council of Harrisburg.