Gina McGovern, Ph.D.

The mission of the SHAYPE Lab is to examine ways to use social and emotional learning to heal adults and youth & promote equity. Our research creates rich descriptions of practices that support the positive development of diverse youth and the adults who work with them.

Dr. McGovern is the Principal Investigator of the SHAYPE Lab. She works with collaborators across the country and undergraduate students from Central Michigan University.

See descriptions of our active and past projects below. Where possible, a link to the full text or additional resources is also provided.

Download Dr. McGovern's Curriculum Vitae.

This systematic review of the qualitative literature (30 articles between 2005 and 2022) examined practices used in out-of-school programs for Black youth.

Specifically, we examined how programs engage in practices that protect youth from race-related stress and promote youth’s racial-ethnic identity and critical consciousness development. Our findings specify a set of research-backed recommendations for out-of-school program practices that attend to the unique, racialized experiences of Black youth. The findings can be used to guide implementation of these practices by youth workers in programs serving Black youth.

Click here to see the full list of included studies.

McGovern, G., Jones, M., Watson, Jr., C., & Mathson, S. (Under Review). Navigating to Justice: Systematic review of the protective and promotive functions of out-of-school programs for African American youth development.

Nicholas, D. (2024, May 1). Central Focus: How to Build a Better Afterschool Program. [Radio broadcast]. WCMU. https://radio.wcmu.org/show/central-focus/2024-05-10/central-focus-how-to-build-a-better-afterschool-program

McGovern, G., Jones, M., & Watson, C., Jr. (2024, April). Protective and promotive functions of youth programs for the positive development of Black youth. Society for Research on Adolescence Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. https://www.s-r-a.org/2024-annual-meeting-in-chicago-portal

McGovern, G. & Jones, M. (2024, April 25). Navigating to justice: How youth programs support the positive development of Black youth. 9th Annual Diversity Symposium, Central Michigan University.

Baerren, E. (2024, January 3). How to Build a Better Afterschool Program. Our CMU. https://www.cmich.edu/news/details/how-to-build-a-better-afterschool-program

The Radical L.O.V.E. Institute (RLI) is a series of professional learning modules that use hip-hop’s core cultural elements of resistance, celebration, Blackness and youthfulness to strengthen educators’ healing-centered practice.

It was co-developed by Dr. McGovern and Cortez Watson, Jr., MEd, LSMA in 2020. Through applied learning experiences over four or more in-person half-day sessions, adult practitioners engage in collective reimagination of policy, pedagogy, and practice that shape their educational spaces. A multi-year cycle of development, implementation, and evaluation has tested the proof-of-concept of this transformative model in higher education, showing that participants simultaneously found value in and were challenged by the RLI.

Watson, Jr., C., Cassady, J., Davis, D., Fisher, R., & McGovern, G. (In Preparation). Development and evaluation of The Hip-Hop F.I.R.M.’s Radical L.O.V.E. Institute.

Watson, C., Jr., McGovern, G. (2023, November). Radical L.O.V.E. Institute: Hip-hop inspired, healing-centered SEL with youth and adults. [Conference Pre-session] Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) SEL Exchange, Atlanta, GA.

This project focuses on the practices of out-of-school time program leaders to promote and address equity and social justice issues within the context of social and emotional learning offerings.

In this project, we conducted focus groups with out-of-school time educators in order to understand how the REQSEL measure might be adapted for out-of-school time settings.

Funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

PI: Gina McGovern, Central Michigan University

Co-PI: Dr. Deborah Rivas-Drake, University of Michigan Department of Psychology and Education

McGovern, G., Lewis, A. (In Preparation). Racial equity-oriented practices for social and emotional learning: Readiness and reluctance among afterschool educators.

Walker, I.A., Beauplan, Y., Ip, K. I., McGovern, G., Lewis, A. L., (2023, April). Culturally- and trauma-informed perspectives on violence exposure among youth of color. Symposium at the Society for Research on Adolescence. https://annualmeeting.s-r-a.org/

Portfolio of Dr. McGovern's Collaborations Prior to the SHAYPE Lab

As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, my duties included: data management and analysis; preparation of publications and conference presentations; supervision and mentoring of research assistants, including community-based research staff; and relationship management of project partners.

The School and Community Pathways to Engagement (SCoPE) Project is a longitudinal mixed-method study of adolescents’ social-emotional learning, ethnic-racial identity and sociopolitical development, and civic engagement conducted in partnership with a large, Midwestern public school district and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning.

As an extension of this work, we are validating a measure of teacher practices for racial equity-based social and emotional learning (REQSEL). This self-report measure gauges teachers' use of practices in four domains: There are four components: 1) awareness of diverse ethnic/racial identities and experiences, 2) acknowledging and addressing racial injustice, 3) acknowledging and addressing xenophobia, and 4) supporting students’ agency, voice, and power.

PI: Dr. Deborah Rivas-Drake, University of Michigan Department of Psychology and Education

Co-PI: Dr. Enid Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan Department of Education

Co-PI: Dr. Robert Jagers, The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)

Funded by W.T. Grant Foundation.

Rivas-Drake, D., Channey, J., McGovern, G., & Pinetta, B. J. (2024). Preliminary development of the Racial Equity-oriented Social-Emotional Learning Practices measure. AERA Open, 10. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241246717

McGovern, G., Pinetta, B. J., Montoro, J. M., Channey, J., Rosario-Ramos, E., & Rivas-Drake, D. (2023). Stretching towards social justice: A case study of transformative social and emotional learning (SEL). Social and Emotional Learning: Research, Practice, and Policy, 2, 100018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sel.2023.100018

Rivas-Drake, D., Rosario-Ramos, E., McGovern, G., Jagers, R.J. (2021) Rising up together: Spotlighting transformative SEL in practice with Latinx youth. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Chicago, IL. https://casel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SEL-Rising-Up-Together.pdf

McGovern, G., Ackerman, C., Rivas-Drake, D., Skoog-Hoffman, A. (2022). The motivating affordances of research-practice partnerships for examining SEL instruction. In: N. Yoder & A. Skoog-Hoffman (Eds). Motivating the SEL field forward through equity (pp. 179-195). Emerald Publishing.

For this project, I managed data collection, cleaning, and organization for 60+ interviews and 6 focus groups; coordinated multiple data collection sites; analyzed interview data using grounded theory techniques and NVivo software; and supervised undergraduate researchers who assisted with the data management and coding.

This project, funded by Character Lab and in partnership with Outward Bound examines how program leaders shape youth experiences of positive development. It focuses specifically on how they facilitate youth’s translation of setbacks and challenges into learning experiences and how leader-youth discussions contribute to this process.

PI: Dr. Reed Larson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Department of Human Development and Family Studies

Funded by Character Lab.

Larson, R., Orson, C., McGovern, G. (2022) Responding to teenagers’ emotional meltdowns: How Outward Bound instructors facilitate development of anxiety management skills. Journal of Adolescent Research. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F07435584221099599

McGovern, G. (2021). How Outward Bound co-instructor relationships create a context for emotional support during stressful course situations. Journal of Community Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22570

McGovern, G. (2021) Outward Bound instructors’ experience of stress: Storms, students, and role strain. Journal of Experiential Education. doi:10.1177/10538259211012714

Orson, C., McGovern, G., & Larson, R. (2020). How challenges and peers contribute to social-emotional learning in outdoor adventure education programs. Journal of Adolescence, 81, 7-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2020.02.014

As Project Manager, I coordinated all aspects of the project: conducting site visits to each program; conducting an extensive literature review; selecting and developing measures; managing quantitative and qualitative data collection; leading qualitative analysis with three coders; co-authoring manuscripts and presentations; and maintaining positive and effective relationships between all collaborators. In addition, I planned and facilitated three live meetings in which the practitioners, researchers, and funders came together to synthesize findings.

The Social and Emotional Learning Challenge is a mixed-methods project designed to extract and describe best practices employed by exemplary programs to encourage the development of social-emotional skills in teenagers, particularly those exposed to trauma, poverty, and injustice. It is a partnership between national funder SCE, the Weikart Center, eight exemplary youth programs serving vulnerable youth, and a team of technical research consultants, including Reed Larson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

PI: Dr. Charles Smith, David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality at the Forum for Youth Investment

Funded by SCE.

Larson, R. W., Walker, K. C., & McGovern, G. (2019). Youth programs as contexts for development of ethical judgment and action. In L. A. Jensen (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of moral development: An interdisciplinary perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, C., McGovern, G., Larson, R., Hillaker, B., & Peck, S. C. (2016). Preparing youth to thrive: Promising practices in social and emotional learning. Ypsilanti, MI: David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality at the Forum for Youth Investment. https://forumfyi.org/knowledge-center/preparing-youth-to-thrive-promising-practices-for-social-emotional-learning/

Smith, C., McGovern, G., Peck, S. C., Larson, R., & Roy, L. (2016). Preparing youth to thrive: Methodology and findings from the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge. Ypsilanti, MI: David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality at the Forum for Youth Investment. https://forumfyi.org/knowledge-center/sel-challenge-tech-report/

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