Nurturing a Child’s Happiness Quotient through Art
Our latest collaboration is with a wonderful organisation called Saturday Art Class (SArC). Using art as a tool, they provide an alternate education to children from low-income communities. Our students have been benefiting from their classes for the last few weeks! Read on to hear from a SArC Team member about their origins, and learn about their COVID-19 recovery project, which led to our collaboration with them!
We find ourselves in a world which is more overwhelming, challenging and restricted than before. With the pandemic, physical health is on everyone’s minds, and mental health has been the inevitable casualty. Now more than ever there is a burning need to introduce the idea of social-emotional learning (SEL) into homes and classrooms. This is especially necessary for children from low-income communities in India, due to the lack of imparting life-skills, character building and social emotional learning tools in their schools and communities.
Though efforts are being made to increase the reach of academics, there is very little focus on teaching children how to regulate their emotions, communicate with others, use compassion and empathy to understand the needs of others and build strong relationships. This manifests as an obstacle to the child’s ability, not just to perform academically in the classroom, but also to think critically, make informed decisions and negotiate risks and challenges, reducing the quality of their lives and their productive participation in the society.
The goal of Saturday Art Class is to address these shortcomings in low-income academics through the use of art as a tool for SEL. When co-founders Manasi Mehan and Chhavi Khandelwal conducted their first Saturday Art Class with a batch of 30 students, they realized just how powerful an alternate arts education could be. They noticed that children from these low-income communities had skipped their childhood in the process of growing up. They lacked a safe space to express themselves. Through this art based intervention, children not only enjoyed the process of creating but invariably started expressing freely. It was a great platform for exposing them to social-emotional skills, something that they could not learn from Maths, Science or English because they connected with art as a simpler form of expression.
From the beginning of this journey in July 2017 up until now, the team has planned and executed several lesson plans based on works of international as well as Indian artists, some of the prominent ones being Van Gogh, Yayoi Kusama, Damien Hirst, S. H. Raza and Madhvi Parekh. All of these artists came from troubled backgrounds and it was through art that they found a voice to communicate with the world, the struggles that they were facing in their lives.
Finding a voice to communicate has been especially challenging this year. When the pandemic hit, the first instinct was to plan a Recovery campaign for the student community. The children were facing uncertainty, lack of safe spaces to express themselves, and struggling with the economic ramifications of the lockdown. This led to the introduction of Virtual Classrooms, which provided children an avenue to creatively explore and become self-aware of their current surroundings. Another recent addition to the program is a workbook called “In My Mind” which helps to bridge the technological gap that was a blocker to reaching every student in the community. Not only is the workbook enabling all the creative little humans to continue to learn and build a strong relationship with their own vivid minds, but it will also be made accessible as an open source, enabling thousands of children to tap into Social-Emotional Learning and Art.
Though the switch to virtual classes was a struggle for the entire team initially, the levels of comfort, engagement, and attendance went up every week. The students also became more comfortable in expressing themselves without fear of judgement, and they gradually opened up about the difficulties of staying indoors. While continuing classes online seemed like a daunting task, it also allowed for some experiences that would not take place in a physical space. Due to the small number of batches, the students were now getting personal attention from the facilitators. Going virtual allowed the team to collaborate with other organizations like Pune Learns, broadening the reach of SEL.
A facilitator from a partner school shared the story of a student named Reema, who started classes as a shy student and slow learner. During a routine mood check activity, Reema mentioned that she had not been feeling good lately. After class when the facilitator got in touch with her, she opened up about how she was not able to cope with studies and how that was influencing her behaviour. It’s incredible that she not only shared her difficulty without hesitating but was also able to point out why it made her feel a certain way. This is a great example of how social emotional learning equips children with the skills needed to better manage their emotions, fostering a healthier and more successful mindset.
Today, 9 months into the pandemic, the students have adapted to the virtual classes, and are able to channel their difficult emotions through activities like movement or art. New students who joined the program as a result of virtual collaborations, like the Pune Learns students, have also adapted remarkably, and It’s commendable how they all continue to remain enthusiastic and curious despite their difficult surroundings. This vision for the virtual recovery program could not have been brought to life without the collective effort of so many moving pieces — the entire team, facilitators, partner schools, donors, and most importantly the students and parents who have incorporated the Saturday Art Class curriculum as part of their lives.
The Pune Learns team is extremely excited about our collaboration with Saturday Art Class, and we’re so glad to see our students already reaping the rewards of working on social and emotional learning!
– By Yamini Joshi (Social Media and Communications at SArC)
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