2021-22 Start2Finish Research Collaboration

This upcoming 2021-22 school year, we wish to measure any improvements in student resilience through qualitative or mixed methods research before and after going through our S2F Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum. Resilience at S2F is defined as the faculties students from communities of complexities need to live full lives. Our commitment to resilience is demonstrated in Bettina L. Love's book, We Want To Do More Than Survive, where she lays out the importance of children from marginalized backgrounds thriving in their environments. Another tool we have found useful is the UNICEF child deprivation index.

Start2Finish is a national non-profit that operates in over 60 communities across Canada and focuses on breaking the cycle of child poverty in Canada by providing ongoing educational support for Canada’s at-risk children throughout their school years.

Our programs provide an equity-focused approach by nurturing mind, body, and social health of our participants so they are empowered to succeed and become role models for change. By instilling the joy of education, we contribute to children staying in school and making an impact in their communities.

Over the course of the pandemic, it became evident that there were issues with our students and their families feeling that they could not develop healthy coping mechanisms or share their social-emotional states in a safe environment. Through the S2F online program and the SEL curriculum, anecdotal evidence revealed a positive outcome for our students in these areas.

As a research-based organization, we wish to engage in a scientifically sound research program to assess the potential benefits of our curriculum. Included are two articles that we have found to support our anecdotal evidence through measurement of family stress during the pandemic and the benefit of temperament-based approaches in the classroom. These articles model the type of research we wish to do:

Browne, D., Wade, M., May, S., Jenkins, J., & Prime, H. (2021). COVID-19 Disruption gets inside the family: A two month multilevel study of family stress during the pandemic. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001237

Kinkead-Clark, Z. (2020). Using temperament-based approaches to negotiate the terrains of crisis in Jamaican early childhood classrooms. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 41(3), 209–222. https://doi.org/10.1080/10901027.2019.1609142

At Start2Finish, we have approximately 1500-3500 children in over 50 schools participating in our online and in-person programs. Many live in deprivation and/or are low-income students, experiencing a high level of day-to-day stress. We would be interested in understanding how temperament-based approaches such as SEL are perceived by students and how our curriculum may help improve resilience in our students. S2F relies on our Scientific Advisory Board and our current relationships with Research Fellows to guide our research goals.

 

Contact Us

If you are a researcher interested in resilience and Social-Emotional Learning in children at risk due to poverty, please get in touch with us to discuss a possible collaboration.

Land Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the land on which we work, and which Start2Finish operates, is part of the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples inhabited and cared for this land. In particular, we acknowledge the territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples; the land that is home to the Metis; and most recently, the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation who are direct descendants of the Mississaugas of the Credit. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land, and by doing so, give our respect to its first inhabitants.

We welcome you to acknowledge the land you are on https://www.whose.land/fr/

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