Healing education, nurturing through writing: autonomic & somatic nervous system social-emotional learning techniques for writing and their application in cultural translation

Dafna Rica Ezran-Young
Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:45:16 PDT

Alaska school districts have provided structured, district-led social-emotional learning since the 1990s. The Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning website showcases the Anchorage School District’s program, highlighting its standards and early initiatives as models for districts across the nation to emulate when developing and implementing their programs. Yet, K-12 social-emotional learning programs have failed to adequately support Alaskan students. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, two urban Alaskan school districts have adopted a supplementary strategy: they contract with outside agencies to provide mental health services on site at schools. Some schools have modified the social-emotional learning paradigm to increase cultural responsiveness or embed social-emotional learning in the academic curriculum. Because the writing process commonly generates fear, placing social emotional lessons in the writing curriculum provides reciprocal benefits. While, early on, social emotional learning programs modulated fear responses by regulating the autonomic nervous system preferentially via stillness or verbal expression, evidence-based techniques exist that activate the somatic nervous system in movement oriented, minimally verbal means for healing. Research by Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, Peter Levine, Maggie Kline, and Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks has shown that somatic movements for coping with fear offer an effective supplement for nervous system regulation. Somatic techniques have a low threshold to participation and are collaborative, relationship-building, and minimally directive. Multiple communities’ traditional Jewish spiritual practices and philosophies act similarly, as do numerous Alaska Native pedagogies and epistemologies that have relied, for millennia, on similar theoretical principles. For novice teachers from outside Alaska, a Western social emotional learning model that includes somatic techniques may provide a bridging construct, allowing such teachers time to build cultural competence and adapt when they begin teaching in rural Alaskan communities as they develop an initial, general, culturally responsive pedagogical understanding.