Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Script Analysis

Partner: Bill Thompson, Young Storytellers, Non-Profit

Overview

Project Description

Young Storytellers is a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization that sparks creative self-discovery through storytelling. Our programs highlight young people as the center of their own narratives, emphasize that their stories matter, and celebrate their unique voices as the ones telling them. We work towards a future where young people experience the impact that their thoughts, feelings, and words can have on the world in which they live. Our programs act as a tool to convene the necessary elements in any community to facilitate connection between young people, the general population, and the schools that act as a central hub of growth and activity.

To ensure that students are fully prepared to meet the complex and nuanced demands of the 21st century, Young Storytellers believes that the academic knowledge that schools impart must be matched by a commitment to developing social and emotional skills and competencies. Through a creative storytelling program that engages youth at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, our organization offers a free, Common Core-aligned, scaling curriculum to address targeted needs in public education. Using group exercises and volunteer mentors, we provide underserved young people an opportunity to write stories in script form and see them brought to life.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is multifaceted and often difficult to teach in traditional classroom settings, but is without question essential to developing a young person’s ability to recognize and manage emotions, build relationships, solve interpersonal problems, and make effective and ethical decisions. Each year, our program results in more than 1,200 scripts written by 5th graders (with a total of 11,498 having been written over the life of the organization) and we believe this corpus offers a rich landscape of insights into how our program engages with SEL. We do not, however, have the means or capacity to analyze it on our own. We also feel that by looking at these scripts — the end result of our program — there are opportunities for us to adapt curriculum, volunteer training, and bolster our case for support in grant applications. In short, we know there’s a lot there that can transform our work, but we don’t know how best to engage these scripts as data.

Expected Deliverable

From this project, we hope to get a solid analysis of our 5th grade Script to Stage scripts, focusing on analysis of gender and cultural representation in them. Furthermore, we hope that we are able to generate learnings to inform the refinement of best practices around integrating SEL, Social Justice and Trauma Informed Teaching Strategies in our educational programs. We feel this will help us better train volunteers on SEL, Social Justice, and Trauma Informed Teaching Strategies. Our staff are highly collaborative, so what exactly constitutes a “cultural representation” is a possibly thorny discussion we look forward to having with a Discovery Project team.

What would a successful semester look like to you?

A successful semester would see us leave with an empirically grounded understanding of how our students are expressing a certain set of ideas (around gender and culture) in their scripts and, in turn, leave with ideas internally for how we can make our work more effective based on that empiric analysis.

Additional Skills from ideal candidates

Experience with scriptwriting software (Final Draft, Celtex, Writer Duet) or script format might be useful but is by no means necessary.

Data

Models

Conclusion