Informative Speech on Keeping the Arts Alive in Public Education Journal Article
Front Psychol. 2021; 12: 624712.
Delineating the Benefits of Arts Education for Children's Socioemotional Development
Steven J. Holochwost
iWolfBrown, Cambridge, MA, United States,
2Section of Psychology, Lehman College, City University of New York, Bronx, NY, United States,
Thalia R. Goldstein
3Department of Psychology, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, United States,
Dennie Palmer Wolf
1WolfBrown, Cambridge, MA, United states of america,
Received 2020 Nov 1; Accepted 2021 Apr half-dozen.
- Data Availability Statement
-
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary cloth, further inquiries can exist directed to the corresponding writer.
Abstract
In this paper, nosotros argue that in guild for the study of arts didactics to continue to advance, we must delineate the effects of particular forms of arts educational activity, offered in sure contexts, on specific domains of children'due south socioemotional development. We explicate why formulating precise hypotheses well-nigh the furnishings of arts education on children's socioemotional evolution requires a differentiated definition of each arts teaching program or activity in question, as well as a consideration of both the immediate and broader contexts in which that program or action occurs. We so offer the New Victory Theater's Schools with Performing Arts Reach Kids (SPARK) program equally an illustrative example of how these considerations allow for the refinement of hypotheses virtually the impact of arts education on children's socioemotional development.
Keywords: arts didactics, theater pedagogy, socioemotional development, social awareness, relationship skills
Introduction
Although research on the psychological benefits of arts instruction is expanding rapidly, problems remain in the ways in which such research is presented, publicized, and used to inform educational programs and policy. Chief among these is a tendency for discussions to focus on the benefits of "arts education," every bit though all arts pedagogy were a monolithic activity with a singular pathway to uniform benefits. Hither, we fence that our field must move beyond such broad claims near the affect of "arts teaching" to delineate the effects of particular forms of arts education, offered in certain contexts, on specific domains of children's socioemotional evolution, a broad construct that encompasses identity formation, self-regulation, and interpersonal skills (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2021) and ane that inquiry increasingly suggests is fostered by many arts instruction experiences (see, for example, Farrington et al., 2019).
This specificity is essential for three reasons. First, the field has by at present progressed to a point that just demonstrating an association between some wide label of arts educational activity (due east.g., "theater didactics") and some domain(s) of children's socioemotional development (due east.g., empathy) is unlikely to found a meaningful accelerate in our understanding of the relation between arts education and child development. In social club to continue to build a scientific understanding of the potential role of arts education in children's socioemotional development, we must formulate and test more precise hypotheses that link a particular form of arts pedagogy offered in a given context to a specific domain of that development. Merely when all three of these terms – educational experience, context, and domain of socioemotional development – are adequately defined is information technology possible for researchers to reconcile the results of dissimilar studies and make informed hypotheses about whether the arts education experience that they are studying will yield a similar blueprint of findings.
2nd, if arts educators desire to contribute to burgeoning efforts to foster children'due south socioemotional development, they must design and implement programs that tin accomplish this goal. This is far more probable when programs are intentionally designed around a plausible theory of change that links program activities to specific domains of children's socioemotional development, and that provides guidelines for implementing a programme with fidelity across different participants, sites, and contexts. The alternative – offering an ill-defined programme and hoping for some unspecified socioemotional benefit to accrue – is unlikely to achieve results.
3rd, merely as a programme is more probable to attain its aims when built around a plausible theory of modify, so too are initiatives or efforts comprised of many organizations working in concert. Given that arts education initiatives are frequently supported with public funds, educators and policymakers must be convinced of the initiatives' potential prior to implementation and continued efficacy thereafter in club to provide support. Delineating the specific benefits of arts education initiatives to children's socioemotional evolution aligns the expectations for these initiatives to the activities they offer and ensures that claims for these initiatives do not outpace the evidence for their likely furnishings.
These reasons could but as hands be cited to back up an argument for a more thoughtful arroyo to understanding the benefits of the arts for children'south cognitive development, rather than their socioemotional evolution. Indeed, the boundary between cognitive and socioemotional development is ofttimes quite permeable: at that place is a cognitive component to most socioemotional skills and a socioemotional component to virtually cognitive abilities. Moreover, the effects of an arts teaching feel on a item aspect of children's socioemotional development (e.g., empathy) may exist mediated by changes in children'southward cerebral processes (east.grand., theory of mind).
Nonetheless, this paper focuses on arts educational activity and children'south socioemotional development for two reasons. First, it is an expanse of burgeoning inquiry interest, with an e'er-increasing number of studies yielding findings that are now in need of conceptual organization. 2d, it is also an area of emergent interest amid educational practitioners and policymakers, and, as such, the socioemotional benefits of the arts have increasingly been cited in arguments that an education in the arts is an integral function of every kid'south development (see, for instance, the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, Manufactures 28 and 29). That said, many, if not all, aspects of our statement would apply equally well to research that seeks to sympathise the furnishings of arts education experiences on children's cognitive development, and we would encourage researchers whose work focuses on arts education and cerebral development to employ an approach similar to that which nosotros outline here.
The remainder of this newspaper is divided into two sections. The first section reviews three aspects of any arts education activity or programme that must exist considered to finer delineate its benefits on children'due south socioemotional development: (1) a sufficiently differentiated definition of the arts didactics activity; (2) the immediate context in which that activity occurs; and (three) the broader ecological or environmental context in which it occurs as well. The 2d section proposes how researchers might frame hypotheses about the likely furnishings of a specific arts education intervention on children's socioemotional development using the example of the New Victory Theater'south Schools with Performing Arts Accomplish Kids (SPARK) plan – a theater program offered to students in the upper unproblematic grades.
Delineating the Benefits of Arts Didactics
Toward a Differentiated Definition of Arts Pedagogy
The first step in formulating precise hypotheses about the socioemotional benefits of arts education is to develop a differentiated definition of arts education activities and programs. While it may seem obvious that participation in a Ballet class is different than participation in a jazz music ensemble, equally mentioned higher up, "arts education" is often treated as a monolith. Yet, there are not merely distinctions both between art forms, but also within individual fine art forms as well (east.m., genre or tradition). It is an open up question as to whether these differences crusade variation in outcomes, and which elements of an arts class drive causal changes. Any researcher must determine at the start, for example, whether they are interested in the holistic effects of a theater class, with its curriculum decided by experts in theater and its activities shaped over many years (e.grand., Goldstein et al., 2017), or whether they would rather specify and isolate effects of an interim class via well-matched control groups and strictly-specified activities. Regardless, when discussing and reporting any research, details matter, as they define the specific opportunities for socioemotional development unlike arts education experiences and programs afford children (Gibson, 1979; Jenkins, 2008). These include, for case, whether the arts activities were experienced as audience or performer, and whether the arts practice was informed by classical forms, modern techniques, or postal service-modern experimental methods.
Two reasons such differentiation is not regularly undertaken in research reporting is considering of the sheer number of ways in which arts activities can exist categorized, and a lack of knowledge of which of these categorizations matters for children'due south development. To begin, there is the domain of an arts education experience: (1) visual arts, including painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage; (2) dance, including ballet, jazz, tap, hip-hop, modern, and choreography; (three) theater, including improvisation, classical, modernistic, experimental, and musical theater; and (4) music, including orchestral, pop, jazz, band, and improvisation, performed either instrumentally or vocally, also every bit media. This, of form, is a short and introductory list of possibilities and subgenres. Some scholastic curricula as well include digital media or culinary skills in the arts, or dissever out creative writing such as poetry, drama, or fiction into the arts, while others include creative writing genres in drama or English language classes.
Information technology is important when thinking almost the contextual effects of dissimilar arts domains on outcomes to keep in heed that fine art forms are oftentimes combined in exercise, professional presentation, and occasionally in the classroom. Poems are ready to music. Staging an opera requires music, dance, acting, and make up, costumes, and designed sets. Thus, while arts education experiences tin can be categorized in ways that reverberate the disciplinary boundaries of the arts themselves, the boundaries between those experiences may exist more or less permeable than those encountered in the arts the arts themselves. Moreover, elements of the arts may be integrated into educational experiences that are primarily intended to convey knowledge about subjects exterior of the arts, such as when the visual arts are used to teach geometry or when theater is used to enliven history lessons (Hardiman et al., 2014; The Kennedy Center, 2020). While complex, studying how teachers divide and combine artistic domains will best allow researchers to approximate both the intricacies of real-world do and the rigor necessary to form conclusions virtually how the arts bear on socioemotional development.
Each domain of the arts has non-mutually exclusive characteristics which can specify effects. Music, theater, and dance are generally interpretative and collaborative. Musicians, dancers, and actors tin perform solo or piece of work in ensembles of many sizes, learning and interpreting a composer's, choreographer's, or playwright's piece of work. Visual artists, in contrast, tend to piece of work more by themselves, generating cloth. However, visual artists tin work in collectives, and music, trip the light fantastic toe, and theater all have the possibility of generating and/or improvising work as role of report. In fact, nearly theater classes brainstorm with an improvisational warm up, and use the generation of text and behavior throughout rehearsal processes. Music and trip the light fantastic both rely on rhythm; theater and the visual arts contain figural and representative elements. Within each domain and genre, an additional element to consider is the time menstruation or form on which the form is focused. Any class in these arts domains could focus on Western or Eastern classical works, the modernistic artistic revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, or current experimental work. Like any expanse of study that continues to be informed by its own history, arts classes' foci in time bear upon the blazon of piece of work the educatee volition engage in, their freedom of form and interpretation, and the rules they "should" follow. Whether these differences lead to singled-out outcomes is unstudied at this indicate.
Similarly, at that place may exist central differences when a student actively participates in the creation of fine art, theater, dance, or music, compared to when they are simply in the audition or observing. While there is some evidence to suggest that both watching (Greene et al., 2018) and participating (Goldstein and Winner, 2012) in theater in middle childhood positively affects empathy, more studies are needed to replicate both effects, and this type of convergence may not hold for other art forms. Painting or walking through a museum, playing a violin or sitting in a concert hall, hours of physical practice or watching a Ballet are such significantly dissimilar behavioral and psychological activities, it would be very surprising if they acquired the same furnishings.
One starting point for conceptualizing the real implications for social and emotional learning across and within art domains is by investigating the habits of heed fostered and supported by each. Habits of listen are cognitive patterns – domain general ways of thinking almost problems, framing the world, and guiding behaviors (Perkins et al., 1993). Intensive studies on habits of heed are well-established in the visual arts (Hetland et al., 2015), with like studies recently conducted in music (Hogan and Winner, 2019) and theater (Goldstein and Immature, 2019). The similarities amidst art forms, such as their aesthetic and expressive components, have led some theorists to work toward a unification of the psychological components of art forms (Brown, 2018), but practitioners may or may not agree. To this point, both visual arts and music have been found to utilise the habits of mind of persistence (i.e., continue going at practise and working through a problem); imagination (of what changes in a musical performance or visual stimuli may look like); and expression of ideas and meaning (Hetland et al., 2007, 2015; Hogan and Winner, 2019). But music may focus on edifice and creating ensemble while visual arts engage the utilise of careful ascertainment and perception.
Finally, the "same" artistic activity can occur in many forms (Greeno, 2006). To accept an instance from theater educational activity, a kid may report his character, memorize lines, rehearse scenes, informally perform for peers, or perform in a total-fledged production before an audience. Each of these activities has different experiential elements and firsthand contexts, and, as such, may inculcate unlike states of arousal and incur different consequences. Thus, if researchers seek to build the evidence base of operations for incorporating theater pedagogy into schoolhouse curricula and youth programming, it is vital to empathise which activities in which contexts have a measurable impact on what domains of socioemotional development among which children (Holochwost et al., 2018).
The Office of Context
The Immediate Context
Defining an arts education activeness or program by differentiating it in terms of its domain and characteristics is an essential get-go step toward formulating hypotheses about that activity or program's socioemotional benefits. The side by side step is to consider the firsthand context in which that activity or programme occurs. The purpose of this is to provide a deeper understanding of where, for whom, by whom, and how a specific arts educational activity experience was offered. For example, a performing arts residency programme could play out quite differently in an arts magnet unproblematic school and an unproblematic school that lost its arts programs a decade ago. Similarly, the impact of a performing arts program might exist markedly different if classroom teachers are viewed chiefly as behavior managers and facilitators or if they are active participants in professional person development sessions designed to transfer performing arts strategies to their daily educational activity. Taken together, information on the immediate context helps to define the environment/ecology in which a programme occurs, who is an active participant, and how the program was implemented.
Ane essential parameter of the immediate context of an arts educational activity programme or activity is the specific institutional setting in which that action occurs. A good bargain of arts pedagogy occurs in schools, simply arts instruction also takes place in many other settings, from community arts organizations to cultural providers to children'southward homes. Each of these settings has a particular arts learning contour, a configuration of characteristics that defines that setting every bit an firsthand context for arts learning. For programs that occur in schools, elements of this contour include the adequacy of the concrete space made bachelor for the plan, the level of support offered to the programs past classroom teachers and administrators, the history and prominence of arts instruction at the school, and whether arts education is part of the curriculum for all students or whether it is made available simply to students who meet certain academic or behavioral standards. Merely knowing that a educatee participated in a program of music education at their school is insufficient; the arts learning contour of a schoolhouse with no dedicated practice or operation space and a single, itinerant music teacher could non be more different than that of a well-resourced arts magnet school.
Another key parameter is whether there is someone who guides or directs the arts education plan or activity. While some arts teaching experiences may exist self-directed, fifty-fifty an apparently independent learning feel such as roaming a museum exhibit is guided past curatorial decisions and placard texts. However, many arts teaching experiences characteristic a more prominent guide in the grade of a teacher or teaching creative person, and in these cases that instructor'south characteristics become important aspects of the firsthand context of arts education (Diamond, 2015). These may include the teacher'south personal characteristics (e.chiliad., gender and ethnic identities), training (both as an artist and an educator, including access to and use of professional development), their feel (over again, every bit an artist and educator in general, but as well as arts educator in comparable settings), and their role in the institutional setting (e.g., full-time faculty, afoot faculty, or guest creative person).
Finally, there are the characteristics of the plan or activeness equally delivered in exercise. As Diamond and Ling observed, "the 'same' program or intervention tin can exist administered differently by different individuals," and the benefits of any program to children'due south socioemotional development will be adamant by children'southward experience in that programme equally it is delivered to them (Diamond and Ling, 2020, p. 366). The overall quality of that experience will exist defined largely by its procedure quality (Zaslow et al., 2010), or the patterns of interaction betwixt teacher or instruction artist and child.
Studies of early education accept consistently revealed that teachers' sensitivity when interacting with children is the principal determinant of whether children derive benefits from early pedagogy programs (Burchinal et al., 2000; Melhuish et al., 2015). Similarly, sports and able-bodied enrichment programs have been constitute to exist most beneficial for children when coaches refrain from negative behaviors in their interactions with children (such as embarrassing children) and instead exhibit sensitive behaviors such as offering praise and encouragement, and emphasizing teamwork and enjoyment (Smoll et al., 1993; Smith and Smoll, 1997). Indeed, the benefits children derive from any arts education program will be contingent upon their engagement in that program, and date is based, in office, on enjoyment (Ericsson et al., 2009).
Even a very high-quality program must exceed some minimal threshold of dosage in order for it to yield benefits to children's socioemotional evolution. Dosage may be defined by the frequency and duration of the plan or activeness across ii time scales (minutes per experience and time between the commencement feel and the terminal). The dosage of arts education experiences ranges widely from a single field trip to see a performance to daily education that spans the class of childhood. All else beingness equal, higher dosage of an arts teaching program or experience would be expected to predict greater benefits to socioemotional development, simply only when that program or experience clears some minimal threshold for dosage.
The Ecological or Environmental Context
As the prior section makes articulate, arts didactics activities and programs are not untethered abstractions; they happen in a given institutional setting with a unique arts learning profile, and are delivered according to a particular model (which may include the presence of a teacher) at a particular dosage. Moreover, the immediate context in which arts education activities and programs occur is nested inside a broader ecological or ecology context.
The most important component of this broader context is the child or children who are beingness educated, without whom whatsoever arts education activeness or plan cannot occur. The characteristics or features internal to the educatee or students are, therefore, a key attribute of ecological or environment context in which arts instruction occurs. Theoretically, most any child factor could influence the potential for an arts pedagogy activeness or program to benefit a detail domain of children's socioemotional evolution. But some of those factors have proven well-nigh probable to take an effect in the greatest number of instances, kickoff with the factors that are internal to the educatee.
Amongst these factors, age or developmental stage may be the most important influencer across the widest array of situations, due to the trajectories of different domains of socioemotional development. These trajectories influence how sensitive or malleable these domains are when a child participates in a item arts education plan or feel. Consider the instance of self-concept. Even very young children have a concept of themselves; still, among young children self-concept is very broad and general. Every bit children historic period, cocky-concept becomes increasingly nuanced. By middle childhood, children reliably differentiate between their cocky-concept with respect to academics and their cocky-concept in athletics; by boyhood, they see themselves differently in the context of different academic subjects (Marsh and Ayotte, 2003; Marsh et al., 2018).
As a result, an arts educational activity plan designed to enhance academic cocky-concept among preschoolers could non reasonably be expected to reach that aim, for the uncomplicated reason that children at this age exercise non have an academic self-concept to heighten. All else existence equal, a program that targeted bookish cocky-concept amongst adolescents would be more than likely to succeed, if its design and implementation reflected not just the trajectory of cocky-concept across adolescence, only as well the ways in which that trajectory, combined with the relative malleability or recalcitrance of different aspects of self-concept, rendered those aspects targeted the programme more or less open to change. Across different areas, cocky-concept in adolescence more often than not follows a curvilinear trajectory, in which cocky-concept is more than positive as children enter adolescence, becomes more negative every bit adolescence proceeds, and and then recovers as it ends. Depending when during adolescence an arts education program occurred, information technology might be expected to have unlike furnishings, though the precise nature of those furnishings would depend on whether more positive or more negative self-concept would be expected to constrain or promote the plan's potential benefits.
Other particularly salient child factors include gender and racial/indigenous identity. Returning to the example of cocky-concept, a meta-analysis found that school-aged males exhibited slightly higher academic self-concept scores than females (Wilgenbusch and Merrell, 1999). Yet, this overall deviation masked the fact that this difference held merely for academic cocky-concept with respect to mathematics; where English language linguistic communication arts was concerned, females reported higher levels of self-concept (Stetsenko et al., 2000; Kurtz-Costes et al., 2008). Hence, expectations for arts didactics to benefit children'southward self-concept may have to be conditioned on both gender and the specific area of academic cocky-concept (here, math vs. English) that a programme sought to change.
Of course, while we may seek to isolate the influence of different child factors on socioemotional development in our inquiry designs (e.g., by holding dissimilar factors constant), any number of idiographic perspectives (east.g., social identity theory) reveal that within any particular kid, these factors occur together (Sellers et al., 1998). That is, a child is non merely an boyish, but a female adolescent (and many other things besides). The intersection of these factors will jointly impinge upon the furnishings of any arts education programme on that child's socioemotional development. For instance, the magnitude of the gender difference in academic cocky-concept is three times larger in centre childhood (in males' favor) than information technology is in adolescence (Wilgenbusch and Merrell, 1999).
Moreover, the influence of these factors volition in plow exist affected by elements of the developmental environmental that are external to the kid. Most salient amidst these is the kid's family. Many aspects of the family unit accept been linked to children's socioemotional development, from family structure (Lee and McLanahan, 2015; Bzostek and Berger, 2017) to patterns of interaction between parents and children (Bridgett et al., 2015). Other family factors that have received far less attention, such as whether there is an artist in the immediate or extended family unit, may exist peculiarly salient influences on whether arts education benefits children's socioemotional development.
I level removed from the family unit are the elements of the developmental ecology that incorporate Bronfenbrenner's exosystem: the child'southward peer grouping, school, and neighborhood (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2006). Each of these elements may also influence the impact of arts education of children'south socioemotional development, either straight or past impinging upon levels of the ecology that are more proximal to the kid. For example, a lower-income family unit may reside in a neighborhood comprised of families with various incomes, or they may reside in a neighborhood of concentrated disadvantage. While the social comparing factors (Festinger, 1954) that may back-trail living in a mixed-income neighborhood should not be overlooked, growing up in an expanse of concentrated disadvantage exerts a directly and tangible effect on children'southward socioemotional development, above and across the effects of familial socioeconomic status (Carpiano et al., 2009; May et al., 2018). Withal, concentrated disadvantage may also exert an indirect upshot on the benefits of an arts education plan through its effects on kid-level factors, by, for example, limiting a kid's admission to arts education and thereby restricting their prior experience in the arts.
Effigy 1 summarizes immediate and broader contextual factors discussed higher up that may promote or constrain the benefits of arts educational activity programs or experiences for children's socioemotional evolution. While this figure includes the factors discussed in the text, it is non intended to exist an exhaustive list of all immediate and broader contextual factors that may impinge upon the benefits of arts education programs or experiences.
Graphical summary of immediate and broader contextual factors that may promote or constrain the benefits of arts education programs or experiences on children's socioemotional development.
Formulating Hypotheses
In one case a differentiated definition of a particular arts education feel or program has been established and the firsthand and broader contexts in which that experience of plan have been considered, the final stride in formulating a hypothesis is to link that experience or program, equally information technology occurs in those contexts, to a particular domain of children's socioemotional development. Socioemotional evolution is typically defined quite broadly as "the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and attain positive goals, feel and evidence empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions" (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2021). This broad definition encompasses many distinguishable domains of development, including theory of mind, empathy, compassion, sympathy, emotion understanding, and self-regulation, to name a few. The challenge is to use theory and prior enquiry, together with the definition of the arts teaching experience or program and cognition nearly the contexts in which information technology occurs, to predict which domains of socioemotional development are nigh probable to be fostered by that feel or program. In the remainder of this paper, nosotros utilise the example of the New Victory Theater's SPARK Program to illustrate how this may exist accomplished, and so provide a cursory description of a research project designed to exam the resulting hypotheses.
An Illustrative Example: the New Victory Theater's Spark Program
A Differentiated Definition of the SPARK Plan
The New Victory Theater'southward SPARK plan was designed to introduce the operation arts as a core chemical element of the curriculum in schools without opportunities for arts education. The program was based around iii performances that third-grade students attended over the course of a single school year, paired with 15, weekly, in-class workshops that were led by education artists (see immediate context below). These performances ranged from new plays and theatrical adaptations of existing stories (east.thousand., Mr. Popper's Penguins) to less narrative, performances similar circus arts productions and trip the light fantastic revues. Over the grade of the year, students saw a balanced slate of productions, including one narrative drama, one circus arts product, and one performing arts revue. Regardless of genre, these productions featured many performers who were people of colour playing major roles, and the content of the productions drew on the artistic and performance traditions of many cultures.
In-class residency sessions focused on education students information and vocabulary related to the productions they would see and the human lessons those performances embodied. For case, prior to seeing the performance of the circus arts production, Mother Africa students learned well-nigh the varied African origins of the performers and the long years of daily practice that they spent gaining the circus skills they performed in the show. The residencies also featured activities closely related to the performances students would see. For case, before going to see a circus arts performance, students learned how to perform elementary tricks like scarf juggling and plate spinning. Throughout each workshop session, education artists taught many interpersonal skills, including subtle ones such as not laughing or teasing when a peer made a fault or suffered a setback. Educational activity artists would often think a scene or situation from 1 of the narrative productions (e.g., The Velveteen Rabbit) and enquire students to accept the perspective of unlike characters, articulating those characters' words and internal thoughts.
According to our differentiated definition, this was a theater plan, just one that featured performance arts rather than theater lonely. The predominant genre of works presented was mod, rather than historical or experimental, and many of the productions, as well as many of the activities featured in the workshops emphasized the human and ensemble nature of theater. Students' participation in the program was multimodal: for the portion of the programme in which they attended productions, students were members of the audition. Withal, students were also active participants during the residencies, contributing to generative theatrical and circus operation activities (rather than scripted activities).
The Immediate and Environmental Contexts of SPARK
As described to a higher place, the immediate context for an arts teaching program or activeness is comprised of the specific institutional setting with its unique arts learning profile, the presence of a teacher and their characteristics, and the dosage of the experience. In the case of SPARK, in that location were two institutional settings for the program: the theater, where students attended the three productions, and their classrooms, where the residencies took place. The New Victory Theater is a historic venue that was transformed into a children'due south theater in the mid-1990s. It is located on Broadway, in the heart of New York Metropolis's theater district. It is widely regarded every bit one of the premiere children's theaters in the world, and is peculiarly well-known for presenting complex works to young audiences. For many years, the theater has run a program that recruits young people of color as ushers in the theater, offer them paid employment while training them for careers in the performing arts.
The children who participated in the program were in one of 4 classrooms (all in a single grade) at an elementary schoolhouse that had been identified by the New York City School District as underperforming. The schoolhouse had no arts teachers on its kinesthesia (either full or office-fourth dimension) and was not being served by any other community-based arts educational activity partners. However, schoolhouse administrators were interested in using the arts as a strategy to engage students and improve the overall performance of the schoolhouse.
The residency sessions were led past pairs of teaching artists (TAs) who were actors and performers working in New York Metropolis. In a number of cases, these TAs were working in other productions while the residencies were in progress; 1 TA was featured in the Broadway production of The Panthera leo King; some other was in the touring product of the Blue Human being Group (as ane of the Bluish Men). In improver to the training they received when they were hired to be part of the SPARK program, TAs attended a series of professional development workshops presented past the New Victory Theater over the form of the plan year.
The residency sessions were delivered during the school day, and generally during English language arts instruction. The same pair of TAs was assigned to the same classroom(southward) throughout the school year. Classroom teachers and whatever paraprofessional remained in the classroom during the residency sessions, though their levels of involvement varied considerably. To foster a closer working relationship with the classroom teachers, the New Victory Theater hosted three teacher workshops over the course of the school year. The sessions lasted a full class session (approximately 40 min) and 15 sessions were held between October and May. These parameters of the firsthand context are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1
Definitional and contextual parameters of an arts teaching feel.
| Parameter | Illustrative Example: New Victory Theater SPARK |
|---|---|
| Differentiated Definition of Arts Education | |
| Domain | Theater |
| Genre/tradition/methods (due east.1000., classical, modern) | Mix of narrative and performance-art productions featuring the arts of many cultures |
Combinations
| Theater productions encompassing other disciplines (east.g., visual arts in set design), music, and dance |
Characteristics
| Performance and residencies were grouping activities Children were audience members at performances and participants in the residency sessions |
| Firsthand Context of a Plan or Feel | |
Specific institutional setting (eastward.g., school)
| The New Victory Theater:
|
Presence/characteristics of teachers/teaching artists:
| Teaching artists (TAs) were actors and performers TAs received initial training and attended a serial of professional evolution workshops at the New Victory Theater |
Program Characteristics
| Performances:
|
Dosage
| Performances:
|
| Broader Context of a Program or Feel | |
Child characteristics
| Children were in third course 60% of students identified every bit female 76% of students identified every bit Hispanic, and 20% identified as Black |
| Exosystem factors | |
| xc% of children attending the school received complimentary or reduced-cost tiffin 57% of families with children in the school'south zero code were living in poverty |
In the yr that nosotros worked with the program, the children who participating in it were in tertiary grade. Students in fourth form comprised a comparison grouping, and though these students attended one performance at the theater, they did not attend the other 2, nor did they receive the in-course residency. Across these two groups, approximately sixty% of the students were female; nigh all children who attended the school were of color (20% Blackness and 76% Hispanic). Over 90% of the students who attended the schoolhouse received gratuitous or reduced-price lunch, and the schoolhouse is located in an expanse of concentrated economic disadvantage (57% of families with children in the nil code in which the school is located were living in poverty).
Hypotheses Near the Plan'due south Effects
We anticipated that participating in the SPARK programme would confer benefits across a number of domains of socioemotional development. For purposes of illustration, nosotros volition focus on how we formulated hypotheses about the potential for the programme to foster students' social sensation and relationship skills.
We defined social awareness and relationship skills as the abilities to take others' perspective, to sympathize with them, and to form positive relationships with their peers. On the basis of prior research, nosotros hypothesized that participating in SPARK would exist associated with an enhanced capacity to take others' perspectives (Goldstein et al., 2013; Greene et al., 2018), college levels of empathy (Goldstein and Winner, 2012), and more positive peer relations (Dice Consortium, 2010). Given that previous research has demonstrated the potential for attending a single theatrical performance to improve aspects of children's perspective-taking abilities (Greene et al., 2018), we acknowledged that students assigned to the comparison group might showroom improvements over baseline in this domain. However, we anticipated that the opportunity of treatment group students to attend multiple productions and participate in the residencies would lead to still greater gains.
We then refined this hypothesis in light of the differentiated definition of the SPARK programme and both the firsthand and broader contexts of the program. Nosotros predictable that three specific aspects of the program might dilate its capacity to foster students' social awareness and relationship skills. First, the productions students attended introduced students to the arts of dissimilar cultures and the capacity of homo beings to imagine new possibilities. Second, the residencies explored the lives of both the performers and the characters included in the narrative productions. Tertiary and finally, the residencies required that all students engage collaboratively in unfamiliar activities (e.thousand., scarf juggling) in front of their peers. Nosotros anticipated that past making each pupil vulnerable, the likelihood that each pupil would experience empathy for their peers when it was their plow to be vulnerable would be increased, while having students work together to accomplish these activities (and thereby mitigate their vulnerability) increased the chances that they would course supportive relationships with one another.
As for the immediate context, nosotros expected that the arts learning profiles of the two settings in which the program occurred – the New Victory Theater and the students' school – would work in tandem to further enhance the potential for the programme to foster students' social sensation and relationship skills. For nearly all students who participated in the program, attending the New Victory Theater was the kickoff time they had traveled to New York Urban center'due south theater district, and, as such, represented an opportunity to increase their social sensation by seeing people doing things they had never seen a person practice before (e.one thousand., ride a unicycle, do a backflip, or deliver lines onstage). While this may be an eye-opening feel for any student, for a pupil from a school with no arts kinesthesia and no other partnership programs, it may exist revelatory.
In a similar vein, we anticipated that increases in students' social sensation might exist rendered more likely due to the characteristics of their instruction artists. Throughout the plan, students displayed a keen involvement in understanding how performers came to be able to do the amazing things they did during the shows students saw. When given the opportunity after each bear witness to talk to the performers, students would ask them, only this topic would also come up up once students discovered the TAs were talented performers in their own right. The commitment model for the programme, in which TAs worked with the aforementioned classroom of students over the form of the yr, allowed this initial curiosity to develop into an increased understanding of the TAs' preparation and groundwork on the part of the students, as well as the students' interests and aspirations on the part of the TAs. Other aspects of the commitment model led us to expect that students would form positive relationships with each other. Ane of these was the fact that students attended performances as a classroom, providing them with a common touchstone of a special, shared experience. Some other was that the residency occurred in students' classrooms, allowing for the possibility that positive relationships formed in the context of the residency could carry-over to the broader context of the classroom when the residency was not in session.
Finally, in that location is the broader context, starting time with the characteristics of the child. The children in SPARK were in third class at the fourth dimension of their participation in the program, an age when social awareness and relationship skills are undergoing rapid consolidation (Collins, 1984). The fact that SPARK coincided with a sensitive period for the development of these skills raised the likelihood that the plan would ameliorate them. In our estimation, and then also did two aspects of the environmental context. First, there was the fact that children participating in the program were almost entirely children of color who are, therefore, more likely to experience the types of racism and exclusion that tin erode relationship skills (Pachter et al., 2010). Second, the children were unduly likely to be from families in poverty, another factor that tin can impede the evolution of human relationship skills (Moilanen et al., 2010). We reasoned that the opportunity to participate in the SPARK program might mitigate the furnishings of racism and poverty on these skills, and that the magnitude of this event may be larger, given the participants' backgrounds of relative disadvantage (Catterall, 2012; Greene et al., 2013).
To test these hypotheses, nosotros collected information from two groups of students: third-grade students who attended the productions at the New Victory Theater and participated in the residencies (designated as the treatment group) and their fourth-form peers at the same schoolhouse, who merely attended the productions and were, therefore, designated as the comparison group. Prior to and post-obit the programme, students in the treatment group completed a set of measures designed to yield both quantitative and qualitative data; students in the comparing group completed the same measures according to the same schedule. In general, measures that yielded quantitative data were taken from existing measures (e.thousand., the empathy subscale from the Social Skills Rating Scales, or SSIS; Gresham and Elliott, 2008). However, we besides designed a prepare of complementary measures that could yield richer information about the impacts of the program on children's social awareness and relationship skills. For example, students completed an ecogram in which they were asked to imagine that they were forming their own theater company, and to assign classmates to the roles of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers. A structured sub-sample of students also completed a task in which they narrated a short, silent film that portrayed a character trying to escape from a mysteriously and invisibly locked park. Researchers instructed students to explain not only what was happening in the film, just what the character was thinking, feeling, and planning. The resulting stories were coded for information well-nigh the character'south internal states and life circumstances beyond what was shown in the film.
At this point, our data collection has concluded, but our analyses are ongoing. Regardless of the specific nature of the results ultimately yielded by these analyses, our power to interpret those results will be enhanced by having formulated hypotheses that account for the differentiated definition of the arts education activity children experienced, and both the immediate and broader contexts in which that activity occurred. While all researchers prefer positive findings – in part because they are easier to publish – the field of arts education inquiry is avant-garde more rapidly by studies with precisely-articulated hypotheses that yield zippo findings than studies featuring positive findings that are poorly motivated and contextualized and, therefore, difficult to interpret.
Conclusion
Equally this example illustrates, using a differentiated definition of an arts teaching program and considering its immediate and broader contexts to specify the benefits of that program on children'south socioemotional development allows united states of america to formulate more precise hypotheses virtually not only what benefits those programs may confer, just how those benefits may be conferred. This understanding is a pre-requisite for the intentional design of arts experiences designed to yield a particular benefit and for understanding how definitional and contextual factors make the realization of that benefit more or less likely. Just as of import, this understanding is a hallmark of a maturing science, 1 that is able to progress beyond the observation of a phenomenon – such as the association betwixt arts pedagogy and child development – to offering an explanation of that miracle.
Equally our example suggests, the promotion of socioemotional evolution through arts education may be an equifinal miracle, ane in which many pathways pb to the same end. Still, that does not lessen the value of agreement each of those pathways, as each may be the well-nigh efficient route to a particular socioemotional finish for a detail population of children. At present, many of those paths are uncharted; for example, as a field nosotros know very little near how the alignment of the cultures featured in performances and the cultures of origin for the children attending those performances might impact the likelihood of developmental in a detail socioemotional domain, just as we know footling nigh the importance of students of color seeing performances past people who are likewise of color, or the marginal benefit of increased dosage for a particular domain of socioemotional evolution. However, past formulating precise hypotheses about the furnishings of arts education on children'south socioemotional development, we increase our chances of answering them in the fullness of fourth dimension.
Information Availability Statement
The original contributions presented in the written report are included in the article/supplementary material, farther inquiries can exist directed to the corresponding author.
Author Contributions
SH, TG, and DW conceptualized this manuscript. SH prepared the initial draft of the manuscript, to which all authors later made contributions. All authors contributed to the commodity and approved the submitted version.
Conflict of Interest
SH and DW were employed by company WolfBrown.
The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absenteeism of whatsoever commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the staff of the New Victory Theater and the teaching artists, classroom teachers, and students of the SPARK plan.
Footnotes
Funding. This inquiry was supported by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
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