HIKE: Arts-based intervention for children's PSE

Project Description

Early childhood education is foundational for life-time success in many profound ways. During the Covid pandemic, the support of young children’s developmental milestones, normally occurring in nursery settings, was patchy, at best, due to lockdown disruption. This project aims to use an arts-based intervention to help such children, now aged 4-5 years, level-up in terms of missed opportunities for their personal, social and emotional (PSE) development, the foundation for future social and cognitive performance. Hull research in other areas has established that arts-based methods are unique in capturing aspects of experience that often remain hidden e.g. ‘Bringing breathless into view’. We intend to harness the expressive capacities of the visual arts to help children explore and convey their interests to peers. Enabling children to form visual interpretations of their school surroundings will catalyse their awareness of what they are interested in or curious about; furthermore, encouraging children to talk about what they are making, in the flow, will aid interpersonal communication. Previous research shows that the arts often appear in children’s free selection of activities and are key to the development of interactional skills. Here the expectation is that, through engaging in the proposed project, children will become more talkative about their interests and the ideas they want to follow up in the classroom, which are key components of PSE.