Social-emotional curricula and leadership: from collective mobilization to self-motivation

Abstract

This study contextualizes the processes that instrumentalize the impacts within today’s school curriculum and investigates the meaning of leadership in the face of a range of emotions. Historically, leadership has been part of social movements and has had the school as one of its reference points. However, this leadership appears to have acquired new meanings within specific social-emotional education programs. To develop the argument, critical theoretical references (such as Dardot and Laval; Illouz, Collet, and Grinberg; and Safatle) are used within a documentary analysis (developed using Cellard’s guidelines). Two singular initiatives are examined, in an attempt to understand how leadership has functioned within the school routine, which is understood to be a redirection of its historical meanings from the rearrangements of neoliberalism. In the discussion, the hierarchy of this impact was noted to have no longer been based solely on the motivation of a community to participate in a public agenda (the traditionally attributed meaning) but has been reconfigured, in singular contexts, into a mobilization of itself. Leadership is viewed as a pillar for self-entrepreneurship in the constitution of an engaged conduct of the subject with their personal goals, favoring the refining of their own affections in search of showing oneself to be competitive and flexible, which are demands of capitalism in its current state. From a charismatic leader committed to collective well-being, a selfmotivated leader arises, constructed from a psychological design that finds in the school (dualistic and hierarchical) its space for development.