Praxis Thesis

This study explores insights from youth perspectives in an afterschool culturally responsive art-based SEL workshop series. Recognizing the need to promote inclusive and accessible learning spaces that center on diverse lived experiences and promote youth’s social and emotional development in personally relevant ways, I created a workshop curriculum inviting participants to reflect on their identities, cultures, and communities. While facilitating workshops, I collected field notes capturing participants’ engagement with art prompts and discussions. I learned participants make sense of themselves and the world around them in complex and nuanced ways. Participants explored contradictions within and across personal and social contexts, interrogated systems of inequality, and naturally exhibited social and emotional skills and competencies. In conversation with these findings, I grapple with my positionality, intentions, and assumptions going into this work and how the insights I’ve gained from participants challenge and expand my thinking while guiding me in my future work as a teacher. This study, situated within asset-based pedagogy, adds to research on culturally responsive and transformative SEL practices by illustrating how an arts-based SEL curriculum centered around youth’s everyday experiences can act as a space for exploring contradictions, affirming and building on the skills and competencies students possess, and fostering critical engagement.