Students’ Social, Emotional and Intercultural Competencies and their Development in School Settings

Over the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in the number of programmes aimed at developing students’ social, emotional and intercultural competencies. This has coincided with growing recognition of the role that schools have to play in fostering not only the cognitive, but also the social and emotional development of their students. Despite targeting separate competencies, there seem to be many similarities in approaches to students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) as well as developing intercultural skills, presenting a rationale for their integration and conceptualisation on the social, emotional and intercultural (SEI) level. The myriad of different SEI programmes provides an arsenal of useful tools for school-based SEI learning. However, choosing which programme to use, considering how to implement it and determining whether it will be effective can be quite overwhelming. Existing approaches aimed at teaching SEI competencies vary greatly depending on the programme, as does the content of the programme and its design. In this article, we seek to tackle the question of how SEI competencies are taught, with particular emphasis on the content and theoretical or conceptual background of existing interventions, together with their methodological and organisational aspects. We also explore whether and how the evaluation of existing programmes has been conducted, the most important results and the aspects of implementation which are key to fostering the development of SEI competencies in educational contexts. This article presents an overview of relevant aspects worth acknowledging while developing and implementing SEI programmes, and which might prove especially useful when programmes are conceptualised within the overall SEI (instead of the more often used SEL) learning framework. Given the importance of SEI competencies for the overall well-being of students (and hence their parents and school staff), we encourage researchers and practitioners to build upon these insights while developing and implementing comprehensive SEI programmes.