Abstract:

Adolescent wellbeing in Australia, post-pandemic, continues to decline. Globally, schools are combating this decline with social and emotional learning, a highly effective strategy that has been reported to improve academic and wellbeing outcomes for students. Literature suggests that combining activities designed to promote social and emotional competencies with explicit social and emotional learning instruction is beneficial for student wellbeing outcomes.

Singing games inherently model appropriate power-balance interactions, positive student behaviours, and teamwork. When used as a vehicle for social and emotional learning, singing games can provide a framework for promoting positive classroom behaviour, student-student and student-teacher relationships, and student wellbeing. To examine this innovative approach to social and emotional learning integration in the music classroom, a research study was conducted investigating the perspectives of students who participated in social and emotional learning discussions based on singing games. This qualitative study aimed to investigate young adolescent perspectives of engaging in social and emotional learning through singing games, their perceptions of their own social and emotional competencies, and how they could use those competencies and the skills learned through the program in their lives.

This paper will present some of the findings of the study generated through semi-structured interviews alongside audio-visual artifacts elicited by draw and tell and play and tell methods, highlighting the perspectives and experiences of adolescents who played singing games in their classroom as a vehicle for social and emotional competency instruction.

Practical applications of these findings will be explored for music educators and expanded upon in the accompanying workshop.