Enabling emancipation: How school climate and teacher autonomy relate to critical-thinking practice via socio-emotional skills

Emancipatory education aims to foster learners’ critical engagement with knowledge, often by implementing classroom critical-thinking practice. Socio-emotional skills can support this process by creating trusting, dialogic, and responsive environments which enable critical reflection. This study examines how school climate and teacher autonomy shape this mechanism. This analysis includes 54,310 teachers from 18 countries from the 2024 TALIS dataset. Four moderated mediation models were estimated to test whether socio-emotional skills mediate the relationship between school climate and autonomy and critical-thinking practice, and whether these pathways differ between teachers active in social sciences and other subjects. Results show that school climate and autonomy are positively associated with critical-thinking practice, with socio-emotional skills acting as a partial mediator. For teachers with social science education, the indirect effects are stronger. The findings suggest that emancipatory teaching depends not only on teacher beliefs and classroom practices, but also on supportive institutional conditions and subject-specific preparation.