Background:

The need to work on students’ social and emotional competences is continually being underlined these last decades, in public discussions, in governmental policies, and in educational and research agendas, especially following a steadily increasing number of incidents of aggressive and hostile behaviours taking place among peers in schools and neighbourhoods. Research has shown that participatory arts in educational or community settings, are associated with increased self-control, sense of inclusion, respect, and empathy for the others, strengthening of participants’ personal and collective identity, as well as improvement in academic interest and achievement and self- confidence for succeeding future goals (Higgins & Bartleet, 2012; Welch, 2018; Odena, 2014; Veblen, 2008).

Aim:

The workshop aims to suggest participatory arts/music activities as methodology for enhancing and implementing the philosophy and praxis of relational pedagogy in the music classroom to enhance teachers’ and students’ sense of self, social emotional competencies, classroom climate, and attitudes toward teaching and learning.

Activities:

The workshop will offer hands-on experiences of participatory art/music activities, through which participants will witness the exploration and enhancement of sense of self and connection with others, while discovering and expressing their own musical/ artistic ‘voices’. Emphasis will be placed on reflection, while methodological guidelines will be offered on how to design and implement participatory art activities in the classroom. Discussion will follow to theoretically frame the experiences on the basis of relational pedagogy and participatory art/music principles for incorporating social and emotional learning into everyday learning experiences and improving classroom climate.

Implications for practice:

The contribution of participatory arts/music in a relational pedagogy curriculum for elementary and secondary education, as well as for the initial and continuing (music and general) teacher training at the tertiary level, towards a better world for students, teachers and the community seems warranted.

During the EAS Conference 2024, we discussed the topic of subject integration and how to deal with it responsibly, i.e. how to integrate without losing sight of the objectives of the individual subjects. Today this topic is still relevant to (music) teachers and that was the reason for us to continue with the training of generalist teachers, music teachers and other art teachers in this topic. One of the insights we got from those training sessions was that it is indeed possible to integrate music with other disciplines to foster a more holistic educational approach, but it always requires an inquisitive and analytical mindset and does not happen automatically.

That is why we developed a design method that supports teachers who wish to take their integrated lessons to the next level. This has resulted to a series of lessons that will be published from January 2025 – December 2025. In this workshop the participants will be informed about our design method - design based education (DBE) - and subsequently they will create an integrated lesson themselves. One of the key features of our approach is the principle that the music teacher should always seek collaboration with an expert in the other subject. To put this into practice during this workshop, we will connect the participants online with teachers in other subjects from the International Teacher Education (ITE) in the Netherlands.

At the end of the workshop the participants will have a clear understanding of our approach, and they will have developed an educational activity in detail that can rightly be called an example of responsible subject integration. We intend this session to be the start of an international network of teachers who want to design (and share!) more integrated lessons in the future.