The Sunday Post on Ethical ELA is a year-long series featuring contributions from English language arts educator-scholars from across the country. In this series, we hope to expand notions of what secondary English language arts is, can do, and can be. Explore past posts on our “Teacher Ed” page.
Social Emotional Learning, Young Adult Literature, and Mental Health in the High School English Classroom by Kia Jane Richmond, Ph.D.
John Green, beloved author of young adult novels such as The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, says that “all fiction is an attempt at empathy: When I write, I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to be someone else more than I’m trying to express what it’s like to be me.” Likewise, Kylene Beers, adolescent literacy expert and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), argues that literature “offers our students the chance to think not only about the characters they meet in the pages of the books, but also about their own lives.”
Both of these processes are related to “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL), a concept developed in 1994 at a meeting of researchers and education experts at the Fetzer Institute. SEL is defined as “the process of developing students’ and adults’ social and emotional competencies—the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that individuals need to make successful choices.” (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2020). According to CASEL (2008): SEL “teaches the skills needed to handle oneself and relationships and to work effectively and ethically.” These include
- recognizing and managing emotions,
- developing caring and concern for others,
- making responsible decisions,
- establishing positive relationships, and
- handling challenging situations effectively.
“These are the skills that allow both children and adults to calm themselves when angry, make friends, resolve conflicts respectfully, and make ethical and safe choices.”
In my own research and teaching, I’ve been working with adolescents, college students, and future teachers of English to develop their SEL skills, to increase their understanding of mental illnesses, and to have empathy for individuals who live with anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders (See, for example, Using Literature to Confront the Stigma of Mental Illness, Teach Empathy, and Break Stereotypes or Language and Symptoms of Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature). Likewise, many states’ departments of education and state boards of education (e.g., Michigan, Massachusetts, and Illinois) have begun to provide resources for SEL integration in K-12 curriculum, including in English Language Arts.
Through young adult literature, English teachers are in a wonderful position to help students to develop self-awareness, social awareness, and other SEL competencies. CASEL has provided many resources to help secondary teachers to consider how to support students, including examples of SEL in subject areas such as social studies and English Language Arts (ELA) in the high schools (see, for example, CSI Resources: Teacher Practices, which explains how teachers can support students’ development of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and decision-making). I’m going to highlight several components of SEL in this blog.
**Self-awareness is the ability to accurately recognize one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior. The ability to accurately assess one’s strengths and limitations, with a well-grounded sense of confidence, optimism, and a “growth mindset” (CASEL, 2020):
- Identifying emotions
- Accurate self-perception
- Recognizing strengths
- Self-confidence
- Self-efficacy
Using young adult literature focused on characters with mental illness provides teachers with opportunities to help students discuss components of self-awareness such as optimism, confidence in one’s abilities, resilience, and even acknowledgement of one’s weaknesses. Here are some examples (note: all of the young adult books mentioned below are analyzed in my 2019 book, Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters).
Optimism
The Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti: main character Jade DeLuna works in therapy to get help with panic attacks in order to have a positive relationships.
Freaks like Us by Susan Vaught: main character Jason “Freak” Milwaukee is distraught but optimistic when his friend Sunshine Patton goes missing. Jason and other students in the self-contained high school classroom for Severely Emotionally Disturbed are bullied but try to help the FBI with finding Sunshine. Jason’s schizophrenia complicates his ability to differentiate between reality and the voices he hears in his head.
Confidence in One’s Abilities
The Way I Used to Be by Amber Smith: main character Eden McCrorey lives with PTSD and eventually develops the confidence to tell that she was sexually assaulted in her home.
Pointe by Brandi Colbert: protagonist Theodora Cartwright is a ballet dancer living with anorexia who comes to terms with her relationship with an older guy as she unravels the mystery of her friend Donovan’s strange disappearance and unexpected return. She develops confidence in her abilities as a dancer as well as in herself as a young woman.
Resilience
- Sugar by Deirdre Riordan Hall: main character Sugar (Mercy Bella Legowski-Garcia) struggles with bullying from her own family members and classmates but realizes that this does not completely define her or her future.
- Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman: protagonist Caden Bosch is hospitalized after having episodes of hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions while attending high school. He has to come to terms with having schizophrenia and needing to take medication and be in therapy to manage symptoms of his mental illness.
Acknowledgment of One’s Weaknesses
- Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson: main character Lia Overbrook has to acknowledge her eating disorder, again.
- Beneath a Meth Moon by Jacqueline Woodson: protagonist Laurel Daneau has to admit she is addicted to methamphetamine and needs help to stop using the drug.
**Social awareness is the ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures. The ability to understand social and ethical norms for behavior and to recognize family, school, and community resources and supports.
- Perspective-taking
- Empathy
- Appreciating diversity
- Respect for others
Empathy can be defined as an “other-oriented emotional response congruent with the perceived plight of the person in need; it taps feeling for the other” (Batson, Early, & Salvarani, 1997). Thus, empathy is viewed not only as an ability to “understand the other person’s affective world but also to communicate this understanding to the other in a sensitive, caring way” (McLeod, 1997). In this way, empathy can also involve perspective-taking as well as reflection, two strategies that English teachers frequently employ when asking students to analyze and discuss young adult literature.
It’s important to note that, as Mar, Oatley, & Peterson (2009) argue, that when we read a novel, we become “immersed in the world presented to us” and experience a “simulated reality and feel real emotions in response to the conflicts and relationships of story characters.” Thus, stories seem to give readers a “deeply-felt simulation of social experience” that could hold “real consequences for our actual social world.”
Here are three examples of young adult novels with a mental illness focus that teachers could use to help students reflect on empathy as a part of developing their social awareness:
- Your Voice is All I Hear by Leah Scheier: protagonist April Wesley works to understand her boyfriend Jonah Golden’s developing symptoms of schizophrenia.
- When Reason Breaks by Cindy L. Rodriguez: main characters Emily Delgado and Elizabeth Davis attempt to understand each other’s emotions – both have depression and one plans her own death.
- This is How I Find Her by Sara Polsky: protagonist Sophie Canon tries to understand her mother Amy’s bipolar disorder.
As an exercise in building up empathy, teachers can also select specific excerpts from young adult novels in which characters are experiencing their emotions and ask students to reflect on those of the characters and explore how they might respond themselves. For instance, with the two excerpts included below (from Pointe by Brandy Colbert and Turtles All the Way Down by John Green), teachers can ask their students these questions:
- What emotions is the character experiencing in the excerpt from the book? How do you know?
- How do others respond to that character?
- Would you react the same way? If not, what might you do differently? Why?
- If you were going to talk to this character about his/her/their emotions or actions, what might you say? What can you do to imagine/respond to that character’s point of view without drawing on your own perspective/experiences first?
Excerpt from Pointe by Brandy Colbert (2014, p. 63, 75, 76)
Narrator is Theodora (Theo) Cartwright:
Ballet is my life. I’m powerful, untouchable when I’m out on the floor, and one day I’ll hold the titles I’ve dreamed of since I was a little girl: Soloist, then Principal Dancer. The Misty Copelands and Julie Kents and Polina Seminovas. The cream of the crop, the best of the best, the dancers nobody can fuck with. I started to think seriously about a professional career when I went on pointe five years ago, and that’s when I truly realized how few black dancers are performing in classical ballet companies. […]
My room at Juniper Hill was painted the color of celery, which is funny because that was a safe food for my roommate, Vivian. Sometimes I’d catch her staring at the walls almost dreamily, like she was fantasizing about her old meals of celery and rice cakes and apple slices. […]
They said I was a restrictor – that I was trying to lose weight by severely limiting my diet. […] I was thinner than anyone else in the junior company. Even Ruthie, who’d been more or less the same size as me since we were toddlers. I was probably thinner than every student in my class at school, too. Sometimes I caught the other girls glancing at me too long when we changed before gym class, and I wondered if they knew how marvelous it felt to truly take control of your body, to possess the kind of daily discipline most people won’t know in a lifetime. […]
Excerpt from Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (p. 5-6)
Narrator is Aza Holmes:
Ever since I was little, I’ve pressed my right thumbnail into the finger pad of my middle finger, and so now there’s this weird callus over my fingerprint. After so many years of doing this, I can open up a crack in the skin really easily, so I cover it up with a Band-Aid to try to prevent infection. But sometimes I get worried that there already is an infection, and so I need to drain it, and the only way to do that is to reopen the wound and press out any blood that will come. Once I start thinking about splitting the skin apart, I literally cannot not do it. I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape. So anyway, I started to want to feel my thumbnail biting into the skin of my finger pad, and I knew that resistance was more or less futile, so beneath the cafeteria table, I slipped the Band-Aid off my finger and dug my thumbnail into the callused skin until I felt the crack open.
“Holmesy,” Daisy said. I looked up at her. “We’re almost through lunch and you haven’t even mentioned my hair.” She shook out her hair, with so-red-they-were-pink highlights. Right. She’d dyed her hair.
I swum up out of the depths and said, “It’s bold.”
“I know, right? It says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen and also people who do not identify as ladies or gentlemen, Daisy Ramirez won’t break her promises, but she will break your heart.” Daisy’s self-proclaimed life motto was “Break Hearts, Not Promises.” She kept threatening to get it tattooed on her ankle when she turned eighteen. Daisy turned back to Mychal, and I to my thoughts. The stomach grumbling had grown, if anything, louder. I felt like I might vomit. For someone who actively dislikes bodily fluids, I throw up quite a lot.
Last Thoughts
Researchers note that 1 in 6 American youth in 2016 experienced a mental health condition each year, but only half received treatment: that’s 7.7 million individuals living with mental illness, and those numbers are believed to have increased since the recent global pandemic. By including more books with characters with mental illness, and by inviting students to consider characters’ self-awareness and social awareness, teachers can help young adults “improve their understanding of mental disorders and possible treatments as well as build empathy for those with mental illnesses” (Richmond, 2019, p. 196), which should also enhance students’ social emotional learning. And after all we’ve been through in the past year, doesn’t our world need that?
**This essay is based on a virtual workshop I facilitated for the Michigan Council of Teachers of English (MCTE) Spring Conference in February 2021.
Resources
Batson, C.D., Early, S., and Salvarani, G. (1997). Perspective taking: Imagining how another feels versus imagining how you would feel. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, 751-58.
Beers, K. (2016, July 11). Why we must read literature. Retrieved from https://kylenebeers.com/blog/2016/07/11/why-we-must-read-literature/
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (Aug. 2017). CASEL social and emotional learning in high school ELA Instruction. [PDF file]. Retrieved from https://www.casel.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SEL-in-High-School-ELA-8-20-17.pdf
Eisenbach, B.B., Moniz, K., & Forrester, R. (2018). Classroom strategies for using literature to help students with daily struggles.
Association for Middle Level Education. https://www.amle.org/BrowsebyTopic/WhatsNew/WNDet/TabId/270/ArtMID/888/ArticleID/965/Social-and-Emotional-Learning-through-YA-Literature.aspx
Guarisco, M. S., Brooks, C., & Freeman, L. M. (2017). Reading Books and Reading Minds: Differential Effects of Wonder and The Crossover on Empathy and Theory of Mind. Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature, 2(2), 24-54.
Heath, M. A., Smith, K., & Young, E. L. (2017). Using Children’s Literature to Strengthen Social and Emotional Learning. School Psychology International, 38(5), 541–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/0143034317710070
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K. and Peterson, J. B. (2009). Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes. Communications 34(4): 407–428, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/COMM.2009.025
McLeod, S.H. (1997). Notes on the heart: Affective issues in the writing classroom. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Panorama for Social Emotional Learning. (n.d.) https://www.panoramaed.com/social-emotional-learning-sel
Richmond, K.J. (2019). Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Libraries Unlimited.
Simmons, D. (2019). Why we can’t afford whitewashed social-emotional learning. ASCD Education Update, 61(4). http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/education_update/apr19/vol61/num04/Why_We_Can%27t_Afford_Whitewashed_Social-Emotional_Learning.aspx
Social Emotional Learning. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. 2008, 2020. https://casel.org/core-competencies/