Social Awareness is defined as the ability to understand others’ perspectives and empathize with people including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts (Casel, 2009). This includes the ability to understand social and ethical rules that need to be followed for behavior, and to recognize family, school, and community resources and support from others, such as recognizing strengths in others, empathizing with others, understanding and expressing gratitude, identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones, recognizing situational demands and opportunities and understanding the influences of home and schools on behavior.

Social awareness is an important factor for appropriate home and classroom behavior, which creates an environment beneficial for learning. It teaches many facets such as how to deal with family, friends, school, and community as a whole. It helps in understanding others’ perspectives by realizing what and how others feel when they encounter a situation, by keeping aside our own opinions, feelings, and thoughts. At age 2-3 years, children begin to understand that each person is experiencing different things. For example- A preschooler might show concern for another child who seems to be upset in a class. They may try to do something to make them happy. However, they might think of their favorite thing as others' favorite. Therefore, they might give his/her favorite toy to someone crying.

A child’s ability to understand others' perspectives continues to grow with age. From playschool to class 2, a child begins to recognize a person’s emotion based on the behavior and understand the cause of it. For example- A child would be able to recognize that he gets candy because he helped another person.

Social awareness also includes the ability to empathize with others. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), empathy is the ability to understand a person from his/her own perception rather than one’s own, or encountering the same feelings, perceptions, and thoughts as that person. Although, when a person is empathizing with someone it does not mean that they agree with them. Many studies reveal that when young people have empathy, they show higher academic achievement, have better communication skills, lower likelihood of bullying, less aggressive behaviors, and emotional disorders, and more positive relations.

Bozkurt & Ozden (2010) in their research titled ‘The relationship between empathetic classroom climate and students’ success’ reveals cultural definitions of empathetic behaviors and attitudes of teachers in an educational framework. The most important finding of the study was that empathetic behaviors showed a greater impact on self-report students’ success rather than academic competencies of educators. The study also revealed the importance of empathy must be taken into consideration in student-centered educational systems as the crucial motivational concept.

The process of social development goes through social awareness. It is a necessity for the comprehensive development of children. Social awareness starts with interaction with others, empathy, and then adapting their own behavior as per the situation. Both the biological and environmental factors are responsible for the development of social awareness in the child. Lev Vygotsky (1934/1962) in his sociocultural theory gave importance to social interaction with other people. The theory also suggested that parents, caregivers, peers, and the culture are responsible for developing higher-order cognitive functions such as reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, thinking, and others. According to Vygotsky's viewpoint, learning is a fundamentally social process and through interacting with others, learning becomes combined into an individual's understanding and perception of the surrounding. Vygotsky explains that children are born with primary biological constraints on their minds. And culture plays an important role in providing "tools of intellectual adaptation." These tools enable children to make use of their abilities in such a way that it is adaptive to the culture in which they reside. For example- children in one culture learn to remember by noting down while in some other they use tools such as reminders or alarms.

A child is born with a mind similar to that of a blank slate, called the ‘Tabula Rasa’ term given in 1690 by John Locke in his essay ‘Concerning Human Understanding’. A study suggests that all the environmental experiences one has in his/her childhood leave a greater impact on the mind of an individual and shape him/her extensively. It also concludes that the type of stimulus a child is exposed to in his/her childhood shapes the mind and the behavior of the child (Adrienne L. Tierney & Charles A. Nelson,2009). For example- if a child is living with parents who are biased towards a social group, the child would eventually show the same biases towards that race, sex, or faith. Similarly, a child living with parents who are more focused towards academics, the child will also be more interested in academia.

Skills Linked With Social Awareness

There are several skills that are associated with social awareness. The ultimate goal is to understand the idea of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and hence to demonstrate the idea, students need to develop awareness and abilities related to each of the following skills:

• 1. Perspective-taking: Perspective-taking is the ability to relate to other people and see things from their viewpoint. This skill is important for children as it acts as a bridge between communication and interaction among different kinds of people. For the development of this skill, a child should have a better understanding of both the perspectives i.e. others and their own. Once the skill of perspective-taking starts developing in a child, the child is able to understand others and starts developing a positive attitude towards them leading to pro-social behavior. Perspective-taking is a lifelong process as it starts from the early development of a child and continues through the lifespan. Theory of mind is also necessary in developing perspective-taking. Theory of mind refers to children’s growing understanding of their own mental states and those of others (Baron, 2013). It means that each and every individual has different thoughts, beliefs, motivations, knowledge, and mood. (Baron-Cohen,1991). It is the ability to understand that each and every individual has different cognitive abilities and how these different cognitive abilities affect themselves as well as the people around them.
• 2. Communication: Awareness is followed by communication, an important and crucial factor in developing the skills for understanding others' perspectives. Communication is a strong means to convey emotions and feelings among people. When people converse, they share a part of their life with their conversing partner and this deepens the bond between people. This bond develops a subtle yet powerful emotion, empathy.
• 3. Empathy: Empathy is defined as the ability to understand or be aware of another person’s emotions and feelings. It means to understand and show compassion for someone’s feelings. To empathize means to develop an understanding despite the background, culture, context, class, etc. Empathy is like a stepping stone to social awareness followed by other factors like recognizing strengths in others, respecting their opinions, and helping and supporting others. Development of empathy starts from an early age and at the age of 2 years when a child starts understanding others' feelings, emotions, and expressions. It's easier for some children to learn empathy while for others it might be a bit tough. The development of empathy can be divided into three main parts, Building a foundation (0-2), An awareness of feeling (3-4), Showing compassion (05-06) (Poole & Miller, 2005). During the first stage, a child starts developing the feeling of attachment towards their caregivers. Some studies show that children also understand the emotional state of those caregivers and may sometimes react to the same. They start developing the sensitive feeling of how others are feeling. For example, Reema is 18 months old and she loves to play with her cousin Sona. While playing, Sona fell and started crying. Reema looked at her for a few seconds and then she also started crying. She cannot feel the pain of Sona but it reminds her of how she felt when she fell. In the second stage, an older child (3-4 years) starts connecting both emotions and desires and starts relating the feelings of others. At this age, they become capable of looking at situations from others’ perspectives. For example, Rohan is at school and finds that his bench mate drops his water bottle and accidentally breaks it. He frowned but did not aggressively curse his friend as he was aware of the accident and tried to empathize with his friend’s mistake. This gesture shows both empathy and perspective-taking. The last stage of development may overlap with the third stage as this stage deepens empathy between a child and the people around. Until this age, the vocabulary of the child is enhanced and he/she can have a discussion about the emotions of their own and can understand someone else’s, learning other’s emotions with the help of facial expressions and gestures. For example, A teacher while discussing an upset child receives answers such as, “she may be upset because she misses her mother”.
• 4. Appreciating diversity: Each and every individual is unique in their own way. It is their uniqueness that makes them different from others. Like, one can be a singer or dancer, one can have curly or straight hair. Appreciating diversity means understanding that each and every individual is different from others in respect to gender, race, religion, and ethnicity. For example, on the very first day, Ibrahim enters the class and he looks around and finds many other students sitting in the class. They all are different from Ibrahim in respect to skin color, height, the texture of hair, etc. After staring at each other for a while he finds a boy sitting in the corner of the class and still manages to be his friend.
• 5. Respect for others: To make a child understand what respecting others is, we as an individual can be a source for their learning. A child in his/her growing years watches/observes their elders, their actions, and behaviors. These play an important role in developing the child’s behavior. Teaching a child to help someone in need or teach-turn taking is also beneficial for the child to respect others. Greeting people with polite words is also a small gesture to show respect to others.

Role of Social Awareness in Development of Children

The development of social awareness is valuable and important in children as it allows for increased control of social and emotional understanding. Such development is successful at a young age through a combination of conventional school-based education and curriculum-aligned programs designed to enhance the learning of children through different SEL exercises and activities. There are many benefits of social awareness if it is learned at the right age, such as, it helps in forming strong social connections, e.g., friendships & relationships, it aids in understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses and increases compassion and empathy and further it enhances overall wellbeing, both emotional and social.

Social awareness is an important aspect of a child’s education. It permits a student to consider the perspective of other people and understand their needs. It helps children in improving their social skills by interacting with people from diverse backgrounds.

The students who are socially aware can acknowledge the resources available and can help in using them for the benefit of society by fulfilling its needs. Such things also reflect in their classroom behavior which helps in creating an environment that is ideal for learning. Further, it teaches the skills which are useful in the future such as communication, collaboration, social responsibility, and professionalism. Social awareness helps in creating a constructivist classroom environment, stronger bonds and enhances prosocial behavior.

In research by Rimm-Kaufman, S. E., & Chiu, Y-J. (2007) on promoting social and academic competence in the classroom: An intervention study examining the contribution of the Responsive Classroom approach. In this, the Responsive Classroom (RC) approach was implemented and evaluated over a period of two years, on the sample size of 62 teachers and 157 children at 6 schools in the district. The use of Responsive Classroom practices by teachers was associated with improved reading achievement, the improved closeness between teachers and children, prosocial skills, more assertiveness, and less fearfulness in students, even after controlling for family risk and children's previous years' performance.

Jones, D. E., Greenberg, M., & Crowley, M. (2017) shows an analysis of research on the long-term benefits of SEL. The findings revealed that investing in effective programs for all children can increase the number of productive, well-adjusted individuals and can yield tremendous economic welfare in the coming years

Social awareness can lead to a positive influence on people. The company of a child plays a major role in determining his/her social behavior and personality. If a child is socially active (playing with friends, meeting their friends on a daily basis, loves to go to school, is comfortable with teachers) then the possibility of social influence increases. Also, a child might learn easily and faster from the significant others around them. For example- Sara didn’t complete her homework and when the teacher asks her the reason, she starts sobbing. Neena, a girl sitting next to her pats her back and tells her that she will help Sara in completing her work.

Social awareness means to be aware of society, to be aware of the people, their behavior, and their emotions, to understand their problems and pain, and to try or find solutions for these problems. Social awareness is not a term to be used or understood within brackets, it has no limitations. It begins at the simplest of social gestures like helping someone with their luggage and stretches to understanding the deepest emotions of a person near us. Social awareness is coherent in nature.