Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in Museums: Perspectives and Practices of Museum Leaders

Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has been the focus of over thirty years of school and classroom-based research but has been largely overlooked within museums (Eppley, 2021; Luke et al., 2022). Museums are often guided by educational missions and work hand in hand with school and community-based educational partners. Increasingly, more museums are including SEL terms in their program descriptions, noting the ways in which their programs support SEL on their websites, integrating SEL into staff training, and offering SEL-related professional development for teachers.

While museums may be places in which SEL theory has long existed organically within best practices, the recent adoption of formal language around SEL connections is a more recent phenomenon. This qualitative multi-site comparative case study involved museum staff working in various levels of education-based leadership positions at three participating US-based museums that publicly advertised SEL-related public programs: the Intrepid Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), and the Virginia Museum for Contemporary Art (Virginia MOCA). Through focus group interviews and document analysis, this study examined museum leaders’ perspectives on SEL, including what resources and tools they used to build their understanding of SEL, as well as what opportunities they identified for SEL and museums. This study compared museum leaders’ practices for integrating SEL against CASEL’s Theory of Action (TOA) to learn how museum leaders’ actions compared with school leader-based actions for SEL integration.

Study findings suggest that museum leaders view SEL as being inherently present within their institutions and closely aligned with their educational mission. Sites that indicated a clear start date for formalizing their SEL efforts pointed towards community-based needs they identified and felt they could help address as key motivations for SEL integration, including mental health needs related to the Covid-19 epidemic and the adoption of SEL curriculum within schools. SEL programs across the three sites took different forms: while the Intrepid Museum focused on teen programs, NCMA created an online course designed to support classroom-based teachers and the Virginia MOCA began a monthly art-based program for children and caregivers, illustrating that practices for museum-based SEL integration vary in program format.

Museum leaders at all three sites referenced CASEL as their leading resource but approaches to individual and collective staff training also varied widely. Practices for SEL integration aligned with the TOA’s four main areas (Building Foundational Support and Plan; Strengthening Adult SEL Competencies and Capacities; Promoting SEL for and with Students; and Reflecting on Data for Continuous Improvement), but again showed variability regarding individual approach within each category. Museum leaders at each participating site indicated their ongoing commitment to SEL and intent to continue their efforts despite the lack of museum-specific resources to support them.

Based on these findings, this study’s recommendations for a more systemic-level model of SEL integration within museums relate to creating a community practice (COP) for museum- based SEL. This COP would have three main goals: (1) Increase awareness regarding SEL and museums, both within the museum field and more broadly among school-based SEL partners and researchers; (2) Create and share museum-specific resources to support and inform SEL integration by museum practitioners; and (3) Cultivate wider systemic integration of SEL among museums through collaborative and multidirectional SEL Skybridges. Practice-specific recommendations are detailed in this study’s Action Plan.