Students’ and teachers’ perspectives on integrating social-emotional learning into classroom pedagogy in a Malaysian primary school: A qualitative case study

Despite a growing international evidence base for social and emotional learning (SEL), most classroom-level implementation research originates from Western, English-speaking contexts. This qualitative case study examined how SEL was integrated, experienced, and constrained in one private primary school in Malaysia serving upper primary students in a structured, multilingual, academically demanding environment. Data were collected through semi-structured student focus group discussions (n = 22, ages 10–11), two classroom observations, and three semi-structured teacher interviews, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Five themes emerged and are summarized in Table 2 and Figure 1: (1) students’ emotional safety functioned as a direct precondition for academic engagement; (2) SEL was embedded in daily pedagogy but with uneven quality; (3) teachers enacted SEL as emotional scaffolding largely without structural professional support; (4) curriculum overload, time pressure, and examination culture created systemic tensions; and (5) school-level SEL infrastructure was present but nascent, dependent on individual teacher initiative. The findings extend the SEL implementation literature into an underrepresented Southeast Asian context and illustrate, within one school, how ecological conditions across multiple levels shape SEL in practice — with implications for teacher professional development, family engagement, and the infrastructure required for sustained SEL.