Art and Belonging

For the last fifteen years or so we’ve had a very special opportunity to build a totally new for-credit arts subject in schools across America. This has involved a lot of curriculum development and especially teacher training and evaluation. We’re constantly in classrooms watching teachers and students interact and looking for ways to improve challenging situations, and also trying to capture the magic of the great ones.

This, along side of a good deal of internal and external research has led us to a theory of positive engagement we refer to as The Five Elements. The Five Elements we believe must be present in any positive learning environment are: Belonging, Personal Responsibility, Perseverance, Performance, and Celebration. (see a research summary here)

You can imagine, I’m sure, how the last two elements work in music class because Performance and Celebration are well-known parts of successful music making. Though it’s worth pointing out that many teachers do not set performance goals because they do not have faith that their students will be “ready.” This is an error, and we work to help teachers avoid making it whenever we can. One other thing worth pointing out is that the Five Elements must be present at all times in instruction, every day, not just at concerts. So while we can all think of performances and applause at the end of terms, what I’m talking about is at a more granular level.

Working backward through the elements to number three, the teacher behavior most directly connected to Perseverance is sequencing. Give a child something too difficult to do, something for which she is unprepared, and she is less likely to persevere through the challenge of learning it. Think back to the boy I mentioned who made the Paper Guitar, and you can quickly see how that boy would have crumbled under the weight of expectations had they been given to him in the wrong ways.

So this leads us to the most important and the most difficult bits: Belonging and Personal Responsibility. Personal Responsibility is the stuff of diligence. It’s the sense that I am needed, that the team is depending on me, that I matter. Many people bring this sense with them like a turtle shell everywhere they go. I know I did. I walked into scholastic environments with the attitude that I deserved to be taught, and with the expectation that I mattered, and that I would succeed. Not all kids feel that way in school.

But none of that is possible for someone unless the child feels as though she Belongs. Again, there are many kids who bring a sense of belonging with them. There are many who do not. And teachers and administrators can engage in specific behaviors that encourage a sense of belonging, and they can and often do discourage that sense as well. We all can, in everything we do that involves others.

We did a project that brought us together with a refugee family from Syria. It was a mother, father, and two girls. At one point we were interviewing the older of the two girls and she was telling us about how challenging school was for her. She felt the other kids didn’t like her, that they picked on her. She believed it was because she was a refugee.

Along the way we learned that the girl loved to sing, and it was pretty easy for us to connect her with voice lessons for a year. The family was just getting their feet under them financially, so we provided lessons. It was a particularly awesome day when we got a text message, out of the blue eight months later, from the girl’s mom, with a cell phone video of the girl performing “This Girl is On Fire” in front of her whole school. The kids were packed into the gym, the girl sounded strong and confident, and all her peers erupted in applause at the first chorus.

Art is so incredibly good at Belonging. It is most certainly not a forgone conclusion. Introduce the smallest amount of ego or elitism into your art instruction or community-based activity and participants will be turned away and made to feel unwelcome. But the nature of art itself, its openness to interpretation, its expressivity, its many entry points, these things make it especially powerful at bringing people in and wrapping them up in a big giant hug of acceptance.

Photo by Amer Mughawish on Unsplash