The School and Community Pathways to Engagement (SCoPE) Project was a longitudinal mixed-method study of adolescents’ social-emotional learning, ethnic-racial identity and sociopolitical development, and civic engagement conducted by the Contexts of Academic and Socioemotional Adjustment (CASA) Lab at the University of Michigan in partnership with a school district in the Chicago area and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL).

Since 2018, the SCoPE project has fostered strong partnerships with three schools, their administrators, teachers, students, and families in order to better understand transformative SEL practices that help foster civic engagement and to identify methods for scaling such practices. Through the use of survey data, classroom observations, and interviews with administrators, teachers, parents, and students, the SCoPE project produced several reports and publications documenting our findings.

Drawing on our exploration of transformative SEL practices, in 2020, we began working on the development of a measure to systematically assess racial equity-oriented SEL practices in middle school classrooms. This self-report measure will gauge teachers' use of SEL practices that leverage youths’ emerging understandings of community issues and broader social injustices and promote competencies such as healthy personal and social identities, collective agency, critical analysis of social issues, and community well-being.

We are grateful to W. T. Grant Foundation for their generous support of this work.