The purpose of my study is to determine the value of incorporating art instruction into the elementary school curriculum or programs for teaching elementary school students’ social and emotional skills (SEL programs) to improve students’ emotional intelligence and coping skills.
My hypothesis is that art education is vital to the emotional and social growth of children as well as the development of critical thinking skills, creativity, self-expression, and academic success (Brouillette, 2010; and Farrington & Shewfelt, 2020). Therefore, any social and emotional learning program will be enhanced by including art instruction as a component of it, and elementary school teachers can be trained to promote these skills using art as a tool.
Art educators Hutzel and Russell (2007) acknowledge that it has long been recognized that instruction in the arts promotes social and emotional growth and development. However, following that passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and its accompanying emphasis on standardized testing, many schools have eliminated or severely reduced the amount of art instruction in the elementary school curriculum. As a result, instructional strategies are focused on success in high-stakes testing using memorization, neatly packaged units, and a teach-to-the-test mentality, at the expense of developing students’ critical thinking, problem-solving, and social and emotional skills (Haltiwanger, 2015). The purpose of my research is to prepare instructional strategies that incorporate art instruction into social and emotional learning. I hope to help educators bring back art into the curriculum while promoting social and emotional growth and enhancing the quality of instruction.
The literature review will describe research studies that have explored how social and emotional instruction has been provided to students, how teachers should be prepared to provide social and emotional guidance, the benefits of art instruction concerning social and emotional development, and the consequence of reducing and limiting art instruction from the elementary school curriculum. While conducting my literature review, I discovered an influential educator named Viktor Lowenfeld, whose ideas on the value of art education came into vogue in the post-World War II years. I intend to incorporate Lowenfeld’s philosophy into my research.
I intend to explore how the emphasis on standardized test preparation has impacted art instruction in the elementary schools. To close the gap that has been created by budget cuts aimed at art instruction programs, I will be creating a manual of how to implement social and emotional learning strategies through art instruction. Teachers will be recruited through social media inviting them to participate in the research on a volunteer basis. This method will ensure that participants have classroom experience and have an interest in the subject matter and are therefore not likely to drop out. Participating teachers will be surveyed on how prepared they feel to teach social and emotional learning incorporating art.
The last part of my dissertation will consist of a teacher’s manual that will contain many lesson plans that incorporate social and emotional learning through art activities. These activities can be used to enhance instruction in the STEAM subjects (science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics). Through this manual, I hope to provide learning tools that teachers of all subjects, along with their students, can benefit from.
References
Brouillette, L. (2010). How the arts help children to create healthy social scripts: Exploring the perceptions of elementary teachers. Arts Education Policy Review, 111(1), 16-24. http://lynn-lang.student.lynn.edu:2048/login?url=https://lynn-lang.student.lynn.edu:2163/docview/609292353?accountid=36334
Farrington, C., & Shewfelt, S. (2020). How arts education supports social-emotional development: A theory of action. State Education Standard, 20(1), 31-35. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1241261.pdf
Russell, R. L., & Hutzel, K. (2007). Promoting social and emotional learning through service-learning art projects. Art Education, 60(3), 6-11.http://lynn-lang.student.lynn.edu:2048/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/199413583?accountid=36334
Haltiwanger, J. (2015, May 22). Why you’re not learning anything by just memorizing for tests. Elite Daily. https://www.elitedaily.com/news/world/learn-memorizing-standardized-tests/1041875