On the afternoon of May 20, 2026, the Interdisciplinary Salon hosted by the Department of Educational Psychology, East China Normal University invited Dr. Jiang Shan, Hundred Talents Research Fellow and doctoral supervisor from the Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University, to deliver a lecture titled The Suspended Institution and Embedded Practice: Research on Institutional Decoupling of School Social and Emotional Education.Dr. Jiang holds a PhD in Social Welfare from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on child and family well-being, mental health, behavioral problems and related fields. The lecture was moderated by Associate Professor Ma Shufeng from our department, with faculty and students participating actively.

Drawing on the commonplace experience of "policies issued at higher levels with evasive coping strategies at grassroots levels", Dr. Jiang introduced the concept of institutional decoupling: organizations adopt policies for legitimacy purposes without substantial implementation. Whether schools can effectively deliver social and emotional education in classrooms concerns not only teaching outcomes but also educational equity.Drawing on cross-national data from the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES 2023), the study examined the distinct impacts of symbolic institutional adoption at the school level and substantive classroom practices led by teachers on students’ social and emotional competencies. The results revealed a clear pattern: it is in-class instructional practices, rather than institutional policy adoption, that effectively foster students’ social and emotional skills. Symbolic institutional declarations without grounded classroom implementation bring little benefit to students.Notably, high-quality classroom practices exert a stronger compensatory effect on disadvantaged students, whose value becomes even more prominent in regions with severe social inequality.

Dr. Jiang further pointed out that teachers’ recognition of and commitment to social and emotional education usually exert a greater influence on policy implementation than external structural conditions. Accordingly, the focus of educational governance ought to shift from promoting policy adoption to ensuring effective implementation.

Towards the end of the lecture, faculty and students engaged in heated discussions regarding the equity implications and research methodologies of institutional decoupling. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, this salon offered insightful perspectives for understanding the gap between policy and practice as well as its significance to educational equity.