The role of performing arts in nurturing social-emotional learning (SEL)

Shreshtha Saluja

As a child, I grew up in an education system that placed a greater emphasis on the development of cognitive abilities through math, science, and language. The opportunities to build creative, artistic, and interpersonal learning were limited within the institutional structure. Arts and sports remained on the periphery as extra-curricular or reserved for the ‘gifted’ students. But arts play a vital role in the holistic development of mind and body. They create opportunities for immersive experiences that facilitate learning with the whole being, instead of engaging only the mind and intellect.

Given the centrality of education in shaping an individual’s life, I am curious to find and create methods and pedagogies that are more holistic and experiential. Art, that enhances creativity and sensibilities, can be a potent pedagogical tool to facilitate cross-disciplinary learning, life skills, and social emotional learning (SEL). SEL contributes to the overall wellbeing of the individual and building adaptive skills for a healthy engagement with a dynamic environment. Cultivating social-emotional learning holds potential to engage with systemic issues, ensure mental and emotional wellbeing, and healing through the daily complexities of life. The transformative effect of art integration in education has been corroborated by existing literature (see References) on art-integrated approaches and pedagogy.

My position is rooted in affirming the centrality of the body in learning, especially when it comes to social and emotional competencies. It is also pivoted around my own experiences with movement, dance, and theatre. Immersive art engagement has led me to access layered and complex emotions internally and understand the relationship my body holds with external elements – spaces, human, and non-human beings.

Context

The interconnections between art and SEL have been richly documented in the Western context. In India, the work is still in a nascent stage, but emerging literature around art, inclusion, disability, and social marginalization can be found*.

Farrington and Shewfelt (2020) proposed a theory of action on how arts education can support the social-emotional development of young people. The premise states that art practice inherently carries opportunities for social-emotional learning, such as working with peers in theatre rehearsal, reflecting on one’s feelings when painting a mural, etc. The way practice of art can build art competencies, intentionally cultivating the social-emotional components of art education can develop social-emotional competencies.

A similar push for arts-integrated SEL in educational policy is presented by Eddy et al. (2020) through programmes and initiatives** that have successfully demonstrated the use of art as pedagogy for SEL instruction across different regions of the US.

Both these sources stress upon the experiential aspect of arts and how they facilitate integrative learning in embodied and embedded ways.

Policy in India

The National Education Policy 2020 states development of creative potential, social, ethical, and emotional capacities as aims of education in addition to development of cognitive capacities and advocates for no hard separation (hierarchy) between science and art, curricular and extra-curricular. Adopting a multidisciplinary, holistic and integrated approach to education, it promotes professional development opportunities for educators in latest pedagogies that are rooted in experiential learning and art-integrated approaches.

National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE) 2023, in line with NEP, places art education under thrust areas acknowledging that it is given inadequate attention and mentions challenges like lack of time, resources, and seriousness given to arts.

The performing arts curriculum and the school ecosystem

To build an understanding of how an arts curriculum creates opportunities for experiential learning, gauge the pedagogical approach of the educator, and observe its impact on children with regard to their awareness of self and others, I studied the performance arts curriculum being implemented from grades 1 to 8 in an alternative learning space in Bengaluru. I also attended the year-end performance by children and interacted with them to know and understand their participation and learnings.

The curriculum, based on The Studio Thinking Project framework of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focuses on building eight studio habits of the mind – essential skills that students must imbibe during the process of performance and creation.

It is important to highlight that the school policy provided a fertile ground for the performance arts curriculum. The focus is on building an ecosystem that enables learning through creation and exploration. The vision and culture emphasize values of sensitivity, compassion, co-existence, and interdependence with the aim to cultivate mutual respect, understanding, and responsibility. The pedagogy is centered around experiential learning, process-centered approach, and cross-disciplinary learning. Art immersion is a prominent part of this school’s curriculum.

The performance showcase

The year-end expo featured performances by children at different stages of learning. Students of grades 2 and 3 showed the transition of a unique creature with superpowers from the egg/fetal position to its full form moving freely across space. They created this performance by crafting the ‘creature’ from their imagination, giving it character traits, emotions, body language, and movement.

Students from grades 4 and 5 performed a rendition of The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, a popular work in children’s literature. The story engages with environmental activism and explores the interactions between characters that want to save forests and those who wish to proliferate industries using forest resources. The children engaged with the story to form their own understanding of the social themes explored in it. Based on that, they crafted the performance with dialogue, poem, and characters presenting their narratives. While one group took a cynical and realistic approach, where the conflict isn’t resolved and the forest gets destroyed in the end, another group showed resolution, peculiarly with the conflicting parties becoming friends in the end.

How the performing arts curriculum enabled SEL

The curriculum provided learners with developmental experiences enabling them to act and reflect to make meaning and recognize their own learning. The classroom process involved the use of body and space to express, come together in a circle, listen to instructions and focus, make changes when challenges arose, create the storyline, direct a skit, write creatively, and receive feedback. Imagination, visualization, characterization, engagement with existing literature are all action exercises that allow students to gain emotional awareness of oneself and the world around them. Movement with others in a space, creating a performance together require understanding of rhythm and coordination that enable social-emotional skills like communication, negotiation, and teamwork.

Children with different energies came together for rehearsal and performance. They demonstrated self-regulation, alignment of diverse energies, improved coordination, inclusion, and collective responsibility while working together. They showed increased awareness of self, their thoughts, and ideas. They could articulate their changing moods and emotions and how they responded to these in the classroom. Some children who remained at the sides in the beginning started moving to the center over the course of the programme. Changes in behaviour, such as increased expressiveness, dance, and movement were reported by some parents.

To understand the process behind these changes, I interacted with some students (grade 6) and their teacher and learnt about the mechanisms practiced for conflict management and the role of the educator in the learning space.

Engagement with conflict and dissonance

The response to conflicts and disagreements can be mapped to action and reflection experiences that have been put in place with intentionality to navigate the diversity of thoughts and ideas. For example, setting up a system where every participant must speak during group processes, learning how to exchange feedback, guiding behaviour through reflective prompts, etc.

The children navigated disagreements by looking for common ground to agree upon, presenting more information to convey their ideas clearly, trying to integrate everyone’s ideas to the extent possible, talking and discussing to reach consensus. Some preferred to ‘go with the flow’ aligning with the energy of the group. In cases where differences could not be resolved, they approached the educator who guided the conversation, instead of giving solutions.

The educator created space for engaging with conflicts and facilitated the process, thereby modelling social-emotional competencies of conversation and reflection. These responses involved stepping out and speaking separately with the conflicting parties, listening to each side, facilitating reflection, empathy, and articulation during dialogue, negotiation through conversation, and facilitating collective reflection on conflict resolution by inviting the group to share inputs on possible solutions. Sometimes, pausing to examine the situation may also be required. If there are competing priorities of learning objectives, then the engagement with conflict can be deferred.

Role of the educator

The curriculum alone cannot bring the desired social-emotional competencies. The role of educator is paramount in creating a safe space and stimulating experiences for students to trust, engage effectively, stretch, and explore.

The children believed they enhanced creativity and were exposed to new perspectives through the performance arts class. The educator introduced them to concepts, guided them through the activities and process using prompts, feedback, and fresh perspectives.

“Even if we know something already, she brings new ways of looking at it, encouraging us to see things differently.”

The educator envisaged her role beyond teaching. She aimed to create free spaces within the structured sessions to enable the children to ‘play’ around and choose their engagement. The key functions of this role are to provide a reliable structure of learning that is reassuring to the students, design opportunities for exploration, articulation, and expression with regard to performance and conflict resolution, enable the learner to see connections with the real world and life around them, facilitate the transition of information into knowledge, continuously observe and make frameworks for learning simultaneously. It is important for the educator to know when to step in and when to step away in the learning process. They must give attention to each student, building a one-on-one relationship with them and creating a space for equal dialogue and communication.

The relationship of power between the educator and learner exists and cannot be removed completely. The educator is in charge of a session, which enables them to guide the students and facilitate learning. It, thus, requires accountability and responsibility. Authority should be exercised in an ethical way only where needed. If a student challenges the educator, she responds with curiosity by engaging the child through listening, processing, and reflecting, evoking trust, and prompting the child to make decisions as per their need. Assertion of power can never be used for punishment, humiliation, shaming, and labelling.

Conclusion

I have attempted to highlight the interconnections between art practice and social emotional learning hoping to bring forth the vast potential of art-integrated pedagogy. Educators are encouraged to use the frameworks shared in this article to design sessions to enhance the social-emotional competencies of learners. However, I also believe that this pedagogy can be applied to varied contexts and should, therefore, be explored and studied extensively by different practitioners.

The educators and practitioners of other disciplines who are working with children, youth, and adolescents in areas of education, mental health, community development, etc., can apply different performing arts based exercises designed to their objectives with intentionality and create immersive and embodied experiences for the desired learning outcomes.

Note: This article represents my immersive learning experience which has been supported generously by many people. I would like to thank Shabari Rao, artist and academic, who has designed the performing arts curriculum and facilitated this journey mentoring me every step of the way. My sincere gratitude to Debosmita, the educator and her lovely students for sharing their valuable experiences with me, and Savitha, co-founder and director, and all adults from Pramiti who welcomed me as a co-learner in this journey.

References

• Eddy, M., Blatt-Gross, C., Edgar, S. N., Gohr, A., Halverson, E., Humphreys, K., & Smolin, L. (2021). Local-level implementation of Social Emotional Learning in arts education: Moving the heart through the arts. Arts Education Policy Review, 122(3), 193-204.
• Farrington, C., & Shewfelt, S. (2020). How Arts Education Supports Social-Emotional Development: A Theory of Action. State Education Standard, 20(1), 31-35.
• Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf
• National Steering Committee for National Curriculum Frameworks. 2023. National Curriculum Framework for School Education. https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/NCFSE-2023-August_2023.pdf
• The Studio Thinking Project. (n.d.). Harvard Graduate School of Education. Retrieved from https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/the-studio-thinking-project

*Patricia Benitez Hemans, Rebecca S. Levine, Esmeralda Salas, Amy Bintliff, Caren Holtzman, Carolyn Huie Hofstetter & Gagandeep Kaur (2023) Social and Emotional Learning pedagogy and practices for children living in poverty: teacher perspectives at two Akanksha foundation schools in India, Intercultural Education, 34:6, 533-549, DOI: 10.1080/14675986.2023.2265845.

**Details of these programmes and initiatives can be found in their paper cited here as Reference 1.

The author is a social work practitioner with prior experience of working with children and youth in the domains of education, gender, life skills, child protection and rehabilitation. She is exploring the intersections of art, performance, education, and social change to enrich and integrate her existing practice with immersive and embodied pedagogies. She can be reached at shreshtha.saluja@gmail.com.