In the early fall of 2020, halfway through my doctoral program in Educational Psychology, I sat cross-legged in the grassy park half a mile from my house and opened a new book I had just picked up from the library. The title, Critiquing Social and Emotional Learning: Psychodynamic and Sociocultural Perspectives, had caught my eye as someone keenly interested in the unspoken values and beliefs that shape social and emotional learning programs (SEL) in schools. Even as I write this article four years later, I often notice underlying assumptions in SEL such as “emotions can be categorized and measured,” “human relationships can be explicitly taught as skills,” or “one group of people can define what counts as a ‘healthy’ social and emotional person and generalize that to all others.” These assumptions, as I argue in much of my writing, can be problematic when they remain invisible and unquestioned.  

As I began reading my new book, I was struck by the depth of questions posed by the author, Dr. Clio Stearns. How do personal and societal anxieties lead many educators to privilege “feeling good” over “feeling bad,” to the extent that we often rush ourselves and our students through complicated emotions for the sake of “becoming regulated?” What happens when children are viewed primarily as not-yet-adults, rather than whole and worthy humans in their own current state? What kinds of social and emotional learning are happening all the time for children and teachers, yet are unrecognized unless they appear in a codified curriculum?

A former elementary teacher herself, Dr. Stearns seemed to exude as much empathy for individual students and teachers as she did frustration toward the larger systems of oppression that frame and constrain public schooling. These systems, as Dr. Stearns and many others suggest, shape not only the way students and teachers act but also the ways in which they think, speak, and feel. Status-quo assumptions related to social class, race, and gender inform how teachers might emotionally, cognitively, and verbally respond to a student who arrives at school without breakfast.

I was struck by a passage of Stearns’ book in which “Jeanette,” one of the teachers Stearns observed, reflected on why different kindergarten students might have come to school feeling sad. Jeanette tended to wonder whether students from lower-income families had eaten breakfast (attributing their emotions to low blood sugar), whereas she would pose a more complex chain of questions for students from higher-income families (assuming a more nuanced cause of their mood). Here, I paused my reading to scribble notes in the margins. Have I done this? I wondered, thinking back to my years of volunteering in elementary classes and encountering grumpy students after the first bell. What would other teachers have to say about it?

A year and a half later, I facilitated a “discourse community” (essentially a reading/discussion group) with six elementary teachers from Washington State. As we read Stearns’ book and discussed these deep questions about the social and emotional aspects of schooling, I became fascinated by the recurrent conversation around breakfast as a basic need that too many students go without. What sorts of beliefs, theories, experiences, or suppositions might teachers draw from as they discuss breakfast? How might those beliefs, theories, etc. either contribute to and/or work to dismantle deficit thinking around students? Sometimes, teachers’ well-intended attempts to recognize and resolve injustices turn into a mindset of saviorism that portrays students as damaged, lacking, and in need of fixing. This can be seen in SEL, which often becomes treated as remediation for students of color and students from low-income families. Through my dialogue with other educators, my goal is and was to disrupt those ways of thinking and respond to students’ unmet needs in ways that hold their agency and complexities intact.

“Maslow Before Bloom?” 

One of the most common theories used in school contexts when it comes to students’ social, emotional, and physical needs is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (HON). This comes from Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist who first popularized his theory in the 1950s. The basic premise is that humans are motivated by a fundamental order of needs, beginning with basic needs for survival (food, water, air, shelter) and then safety and security, love and belongingness, self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. According to the theory, until lower-level needs have been at least partially satisfied, people will not be motivated toward or able to achieve the higher-level needs. Although Maslow himself did not arrange these needs into a pyramid model (he actually acknowledged that the levels may overlap), this is the visual typically used in current iterations of HON.

‍

Educators are often encouraged to “Maslow Before Bloom,” referencing Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of academic goals (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create). The idea is that before students can learn academic content, they must be nurtured in more holistic ways. This is typically seen as a progressive concept in schooling. In my discourse community, I asked Cindy, a first-year kindergarten teacher, what social justice meant for her teaching. Her answer demonstrates how social and emotional needs are often conceptualized as “skills” that teachers must provide to students when their parents cannot (or at least are perceived to not be capable of):

I have parents that are not involved, so then that is kind of an inequitable situation. So how do I…you know, a student who I know is not getting support at home, like how do I give them the extra skills they’re gonna need so they can be on the same platform as the students who are getting the support at home?

Later, I asked Cindy how she thought social justice might be entangled with SEL. Her response alludes more directly to Maslow’s theory:

I guess just my example of a student not having support at home, so when they are exhausted or even hungry, or if there’s nobody attending to their needs, even at a pretty basic level, how are they getting their higher-level needs met? If they’re coming home confused about a friendship or, you know, they’re not going to have a venue for exploring those feelings.

First, it is important to acknowledge that Cindy knows her students and their families far better than I do. Some students may indeed be lacking support on multiple levels, and the aim here is not to romanticize their home lives. However, I notice an interesting assumption in this quote, which is that if a student’s basic needs are not met, their higher-level needs will also not be met. Another assumption is that equity means providing students with skills when their parents cannot, moving them toward dominant understandings (or “platforms”) of social and emotional competence. Part of my research involves exploring what makes assumptions like this possible…what social narratives and ingrained habits of thinking and feeling might lead a teacher to make this leap? What happens if a student comes to school without breakfast--a basic need--and a teacher assumes their family is not providing them with fodder for rich social, emotional, or personally transformative experiences? 

I brought up these questions over coffee with a friend in the spring of 2022, while I was deep in the midst of analyzing conversations from the discourse community. My friend knit their eyebrows as I told them about the book example with Jeanette and the later conversation between the teachers and me. I listened as my friend told me about their own childhood growing up in a family that often struggled to make ends meet but was resourceful and collaborative nonetheless. For them, financial hardships and familial distress were a frequent occurrence, but that didn’t mean they weren’t simultaneously experiencing rich relationships, emotional dialogue, and personal fulfillment. Hearing my own friend share their stories was powerful, and it made me all the more determined to think about “basic needs” in a nuanced way. I thought back to a chapter from a book I had read earlier in graduate school, Black Ants and Buddhists: Thinking Critically and Teaching Differently in the Primary Grades, by Mary Cowhey. 

Cowhey, like my friend, writes about her own childhood experiences living in what many would call poverty. Cowhey’s family often had to choose between groceries and heat, and it was common to hear her mother whisper “family holdback” at dinner when smaller portions were needed to save money until payday. Cowhey does not glorify her family’s poverty, nor does she attribute it to personal shortcomings from either of her hardworking parents. What she does is humanize her experiences with a mixture of humor, pain, jealousy, camaraderie, and compassion. When Maslow’s HON is taken up in a way that locks students into “lower levels” of personhood based on their experiences of injustice, empty stomachs can become treated as flattened--rather than complex--identities. My point is not to say that Cindy is doing this, but to share her words as an example of the seemingly small assumptions that can lead to larger societal worldviews that dominate over others.

The challenge becomes how to welcome inspiration from potentially useful theories in education (like HON) without decontextualizing them in ways that minimize human complexity or value them above situated stories. Trending hashtags like “Maslow Before Bloom” can serve as helpful reminders to acknowledge students as more than just academic trainees, but they can so quickly become formulaic checklists: first resolve students’ unmet needs in a predefined order, treating them as skills to be attained, then channel those skills into academic achievement as the real and ultimate goal. Instead of professional development or curricula that transmit popular theories to teachers in oversimplified ways, I advocate for practices that encourage teachers to learn more about the critiques and complexities of any theory. 

Questioning a Hierarchy of Needs

Despite its popularity, Maslow’s HON has been critiqued in multiple aspects, with critics pointing out that people can experience personal and communal fulfillment even while living in scarcity. For example, many people fast for religious events (Ramadan, Lent), denying a basic need as part of pursuing a higher-level spiritual need. More drastically, there are historical records to show how people living in the inhumane horrors of concentration camps still created art and music. Human beings so often defy the rigid steps and categories forced onto us by restrictive theories, and empirical research has found little evidence of the hierarchical and linear order of HON. 

Maslow’s model has also been critiqued for being ethnocentrically biased toward white, Western contexts and capitalistic ideologies that promote individual gain. Maslow spent years living with the Blackfoot Tribe while refining the theory, and Shane Safir argues that he whitewashed and appropriated Indigenous knowledge in the process. While it is crucial to acknowledge one’s own colonial worldviews and how those might shape theory development, the solution cannot be to take from Indigenous perspectives and force them into the same theory that is still credited to a single author. Although First Nations epistemologies are varied and complex, many would include multiple generations, multispecies relationships, and multiple dimensions of reality (rather than one single and stable “truth”) in a model of human needs. Maslow reversed love and esteem needs in his model after living alongside the Blackfoot Tribe, in an attempt to illustrate a more communal view of needs. Still, this can be seen as paying lip service to Indigenous peoples and reinforcing the notion that they need white, non-Native researchers to “give voice” to their deeply embedded wisdom and practices. 

Any educator can strive to develop a practice of thoughtfully questioning and learning more about the popular theories presented to them in everyday conversation, professional development, and “best practice” research, including how theories like HON might erase and/or distort marginalized knowledge systems. I am not exempt from this either. As an educational researcher and a teacher at the college level, I spent years citing and drawing from Maslow’s hierarchy until I began to learn more about it. It was a graduate student (Constantino Montes, a previous high school math teacher who advocates for anti-oppressive and decolonizing practices in education) in one of my qualitative research courses who directed me to the Safir article on Maslow’s appropriation of the Blackfoot Tribe. I had long felt ill-at-ease with the individualistic focus of the model, with its emphasis on “self-actualization” as the ultimate goal, but it was not until I engaged more deeply with critical perspectives that I gained language to better articulate, validate, and build on those feelings. 

No Longer Knowing What to Do

A frequent question posed to critically-minded scholars, teachers, and writers alike is-- often delivered with a tone of exasperation--“so what should we do?” After we have read widely, thought critically, discussed earnestly, and self-reflected deeply, how do we channel all that nuance and context into some kind of tangible action? I joke to my students that “it depends” is my number-one answer to any question, and this answer can be both relieving and maddening. When a child arrives at school in a mood that could blow a volcano, is it wrong to ask if they’ve eaten a morning meal or to direct them toward school breakfast programs (which are a crucial step toward more equitable schooling)? Is it bad to worry that a parent might not be supporting their child at home, or to question whether a student’s disposition to school has anything to do with their human needs? I am constantly trying to carve a third space between giving into highly-esteemed (and often problematic) practices rooted in dominant worldviews, versus throwing up our hands up in a sentiment of “nothing is right anymore.” 

Eunice, a paraeducator in my discourse community, vulnerably voiced these uncertainties in one of our conversations about breakfast:

Everyone receives free and reduced lunch and breakfast in the school, so that’s a common question when kids come in the door struggling is, “have you had breakfast?” And I’m like, is….ahhh. I don’t know, like am I, is that the wrong… It made me question, you know, should we ask bigger questions first or do we solve the physical questions first…?

Joon Lee, a second-grade teacher with over thirty years of experience, chimed in to answer Eunice’s question.

I think that asking the physical things first is just fine. Because you’re just, like that’s an easy thing. But I think if we only ask it to those that come from poor homes or whatever, then we’re making assumptions. 

Joon Lee then shared a story about a time she asked a second-grade student if he had eaten breakfast and the student told his mother, who “flipped out, thinking I was assuming that they didn’t have money to eat, to buy breakfast. And that wasn’t at all what I was thinking.” Joon Lee explained how the child had said he was hungry and she just wanted to “find out what’s going on” and make sure he knew that the school provided breakfast every morning.

In this example, we see how asking the breakfast question can result in miscommunication and defensiveness on both sides: the student’s mother who felt like Joon Lee was making deficit assumptions about the family’s financial status, and Joon Lee, who felt misunderstood for trying to help the student access food when he expressed hunger. One possible conclusion to this story is that teachers should steer clear of ever asking about breakfast at all, to avoid stepping on parents’ toes. Another conclusion could be that parents shouldn’t get so defensive and should understand that teachers just want to help. As Joon Lee suggests, asking about breakfast might be perfectly acceptable as long as teachers are not differentially directing it to students depending on their socioeconomic status. 

A third conclusion, which falls closer to the ambiguity of “it depends,” could be that this situation is an excellent hot-spot for critical engagement without any singular takeaway. It reminds us that self-reflection and purposeful questioning only go so far when they are treated as an individual pursuit. Even if Joon Lee knew she was asking the question for a particular reason and with self-awareness of the potential for deficit assumptions, what social discourses might make it valid and understandable for the mother to respond the way she did? As teachers face social pressures to perform daily heroics and single handedly deliver equity to all students without much systemic support, parents hear conversations about their children coming from “damaged backgrounds” or “limited resources” and fear the loss of their own agency. A prevalent discourse I often notice circulating through SEL curricula is medical discourse: teachers are tasked with “diagnosing” student deficiencies, delivering SEL in tiered “doses,” and “fixing” problems with prescriptive models. Without suggesting that medical language is unquestionably bad, it is worth noticing and reflecting on. What connotations, responses, and emotional reactions do these words create? What roles do they suggest for teachers, parents, and children? What other language could be used but is not, words we might notice only in their absence? 

I am not implying that it is an easy, sunshiney solution for Joon Lee to sit down with every child’s parents, have a heart-to-heart, and emerge magically on the same page. It is even more unrealistic to suggest that teachers or parents can somehow extract themselves from the many tangled discourses, both helpful and harmful, that story our everyday lives. What I call for is a continual return to the question, “what if we were on the same side here, even with all our differences intact?” How can we notice the ways in which social discourses shape and constrain everyone, albeit in very different ways? Carefully thinking through and explaining one’s intentions behind the breakfast question can go a long way, but we must collectively work to notice, deconstruct, and reimagine the deeply-rooted frameworks and assumptions that can contribute to angry encounters and defensive reactions in the first place.

Michel Foucault, a prolific philosopher when it comes to social discourse, claims that his project is “precisely to bring it about that [people] ‘no longer know what to do,’ so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous. The effect is intentional.” In other words, Foucault is saying that “no longer knowing what to do” could be a goal, not an unfortunate side effect, of critical thought and dialogue within and beyond education. The point is not to walk away clueless but to become better pausers, stronger questioners, still taking pragmatic action but with a willingness to continually consider something new. 

Discourse Communities as Spaces for Collective Reflexivity

“Reflexivity,” one of the cornerstones of my research and teaching, can guide us in taking action while remaining open and inquisitive. Reflexivity is similar to but distinct from the more commonly used “reflection.” While there is no single definition for either term, I think of reflection as less dynamic: a back-and-forth line between a situation and our own internal thoughts or memories of it. Reflection is often described as a cognitive endeavor; for instance, when teachers are asked to “self-reflect” on how a new theory or concept applies to their classroom experiences. When I hear “reflexivity,” I think of a beam of light moving in multiple directions, bending and diffracting, curling in toward the self and then beaconing out to illuminate the social world of which we are a part. 

Reflexivity means thinking about ourselves as socially situated, shaped but not determined by power dynamics, only able to name ourselves with specific identities (white, woman, daughter, sister, teacher) because of other beings. There is a strong emotional element to reflexivity, because critical thought also means critical feeling. We can think and respond to our emotions in meta-ways, asking, “Why do I feel ashamed for getting angry in this instance? Why am I proud of staying calm? Why am I anxious about my uncertainty?” 

Questioning breakfast and basic needs is just one small piece in a larger mosaic of reimagining and recreating education (and society). Although the discourse community I created with teachers lasted only a few weeks, it was full of self-reflexivity that I hope will extend beyond just that group and that point in time. Even as the teachers and I reproduced dominant social discourses and emotional habits, we also practiced noticing and questioning them.

Joon Lee, for instance, lamented about the “deficit picture” that often frames students and how it relates to the idea that teachers must “fix” them, pointing out the connotations embedded in that language. In a particularly poignant moment during one of our final interactions, Cindy acknowledged that “my teaching is me.” She continued:

There’s no getting away from it, you know? I mean, my history, all of my experiences… we all bring what we bring, right? All of our past traumas and experiences and favorite ways of doing things. And, yeah, our tolerances. That’s huge.

Esperanza, the only Latina teacher in our group of mostly white women, shared about her own experiences growing up with deficit discourse tied to racism and classism. She still remembers a time her middle school teacher dismissed Esperanza’s aspirations to attend a particular high school, commenting “Well, good luck with that” instead of encouraging and supporting Esperanza. “Those moments in our life really still affect us in navigating the world that we’re living in,” said Esperanza. “If they’re looking at me with a deficit just because of what I look like or what I’m wearing or how I talk.” She brings that awareness into her own teaching.

In one-on-one conversations after the final discourse community meeting, some of the teachers told me they felt better equipped to question things in their schools, particularly around SEL. “I think about the pros and cons,” said Joon Lee, “and the ‘why’ I’m doing it … we blame students for their lack of whatever, rather than questioning what we’re doing and changing what we’re doing.”

Elphaba Marie, a Special Educator, said she had never really questioned “that gut feeling of whether it was ok to question.” She said our group helped her feel like she can advocate for students more effectively. 

Importantly, the teachers in the discourse community expressed their desire not for more designated SEL time or more choice over which programs to implement but for more time and space to dialogue with other teachers and explore new understandings of sociality and emotionality. “I wish we had a little bit more, I don’t know, not freedom,” said Eunice, “but like … there’s ways to dig deeper.” Eunice said she wished teachers could all have a “group talk.”

In this vein of facilitating group talks rather than top-down instruction, I do not offer this article to share the declarative takeaways of a professional development lesson on “how to talk with students about their basic needs” or “why Maslow’s HON is wrong.” I offer it to showcase how providing teachers with space to read, question, share stories, and practice self-reflexivity might contribute to more thoughtful and socially-just schools and communities.