Maurice Elias

The unifying themes in my action-research, clinical work, and policy/advocacy are the development of positive, constructive life paths for children and youth and the organization of opportunities to allow this to happen in equitable ways. This has brought me into areas such as social-emotional learning (SEL), its more recent variation, social-emotional and character development (SECD), emotional intelligence, social competence promotion, character education, primary prevention, school-based, evidence-based intervention, and socialization of identity. It has also brought my work increasingly into the areas of implementation and sustainability of interventions, and cutting edge issues such as the link of SECD and academics and the distinguishing features of sustainable, versus well-implemented, empirically supported innovations.

I have worked to establish the field of prevention, school-based preventive intervention, and social competence promotion as a credible, important, and rigorous area of research, practice, and public policy. To accomplish the latter, collaborative models are necessary, as are programs of longitudinal, synergistic action-research with an explicit eye to practice and policy. Thus, I have organized my work within the Rutgers Social-Emotional and Character Development Lab (www.secdlab.org and https://www.edutopia.org/profile/maurice-j-elias).

The Lab is dedicated to conducting action-research in public, private, and religious school settings for the purpose of building children’s skills for facing the tests of life, and not a life of tests. It focuses on understanding the relationship of academic achievement, social-emotion competencies, and the development of character and a core set of life principles, and the development of school-based interventions to strengthen social-emotion skills , character, and one’s Laws of Life and sense of Positive Purpose, and prevent bullying, violence and victimization, substance abuse, and related problem behaviors. I also focus on the area of promoting civic engagement among Rutgers University students by serving as Contributing Faculty Member at the Collaborative Center for Community Engagement (engage.rutgers.edu) at Rutgers.

The COVID-19 pandemic, clear issues of racial injustice and disparity, and the crisis in American and worldwide democracy—which includes the use of war as an instrument of autocracy and an alternative to diplomacy—have led to reconsideration in our understanding of the relevance of social-emotional and character development and how to optimally and feasibly encourage it in school, out of school, and family settings. The approach we are taking involved activating children and youth’s SEL competencies, encouraging their sense of positive purpose, adding SECD “in” and not “on” to existing school and program requirements, and to focus on inspiration before remediation.