Unbound: The Performing Arts and the Social - Emotional Development of Black Youth
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Unbound: The Performing Arts and the Social - Emotional Development of Black Youth

Abstract

The performing arts such as dance, music, acting, and public speaking are essential to the social-emotional development of youth. These performing arts modalities support and encourage the primary competencies of what researchers in the fields of sociology and psychology refer to as Social-Emotional Learning or SEL. Also referred to as the CASEL Five, SEL consists of Self- Management, Self-Awareness, Responsible Decision-Making, Relationship Skills, and Social Awareness. This paper addresses how performing arts influences and supports SEL specifically for Black youth who tend to have less access to performing arts programming, as the arts are underfunded and oftentimes rendered non-essential to growth and childhood development. In turn, Black youth are often bound to class structures that hinder and prevent social economic mobility and are not provided with the same opportunities as their white and/or non-Black peers. Furthermore, Black youth are bound by racialized and gendered barriers and borders that stigmatize Black youth and further restrict their potential for life outcomes as expressed as both economic and political power. This thesis develops a concept of the unbound and is concerned with the way that the performing arts in fact supports and develops SEL competencies through artistic processes that necessitate peer to peer interaction, personal exploration, creativity, understanding of the world, and communication skills that serve as fundamental structures in a child’s development. While not a panacea, this thesis attempts to offer a template (or model) for how Black community parents, leaders and educators can utilize the performing arts to mobilize resources in order to shape and enhance the social-emotional wellness of Black youth, in turn rendering them unbound from the racialized, gendered, and classed violence that permeates throughout Black working-class communities in the greater Cuyahoga County region of Ohio.

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