This strategic partnership takes cogniscance of the power of therapeutic music and arts centred experiences to alter emotional states and engender the positive engagement of self with the world. Through the planned activities and experiences of the project, we will apply this observation to support teachers in extending their professional capacities as classroom-based therapeutic practitioners who can create safe, enriched, aesthetic and transformative learning environments for vulnerable young people who risk becoming early school leavers because of their poor emotional and mental health. Young people in this category continue to face exclusion from social and educational opportunities due to personal conditions that result from their trauma histories, including abuse and neglect within the family, experience of warfare and human trafficking. High levels of such psychological distress exist within school populations in each of the partner countries in this application. We have called the project 'Learning in a New Key' to emphasise our realisation that this group of vulnerable young people need to experience newly attuned ways of learning in classrooms and educational institutions. The multi-professional partnership comprises 4 schools and 5 supporting institutions from 4 different European regions with a spread of proven expertise in teaching, social care, therapeutic intervention, music therapy training, educational intervention, education management and educational research. The partnership has developed a participatory 2 year project strategy to create relevant and usable products that can engage and sustain teachers as active agents of change in educational settings on behalf of vulnerable young people that they are supporting. The products comprise 4 inter-related entities: a school-based teacher training programme, a first step toolkit of therapeutic practice for use in the classroom, a competence framework and narrative impact studies. These products will resonate with the realities of the classrooms where participating teachers are exploring how to frame learning within a relational process that draws deeply on cultural and psychological resources. A main project activity is to use resources that have been developed to pilot and implement a school-based training programme for teachers in class-based therapeutic teaching practice. This will run concurrently in the 4 participating schools. The teachers will have opportunity to trial materials that provide therapeutic music-centred and arts-based experiences as preludes to lessons and as interludes to support transitions. The teachers will be supported in introducing these innovative routines through reflective supervisions with practising therapists, including music therapists. The activities in this multi-local project are given coherence through the even sharing of responsibilities between the partners for shaping the professional products. The various management, implementation, writing, research and review teams all include members from each region represented. The communications are supported through a dedicated website and significant resources that are created are translated into the languages spoken in the regions and schools represented. Opportunities for mutual learning between the project participants are enhanced through an annual short joint staff training event. Opportunities for the wider dissemination of the products and findings are considerable because of the wide local, national and international networks that the partner organisations contribute to. These networks represent the interests of both the teaching and therapy professions and a longer term aim is exploit this diversity through bringing them into closer proximity to develop accredited professional development programmes in the participating HEIs based on the experience of this project. Thus the aim of the project is to promote awareness of the wider remit of the teaching profession with respect to preventing the early school leaving of the vulnerable young people identified. The findings from the work with the competence framework will inform discussions about how competence statements for experienced teachers in the EU region may be widened to include recognition of their classroom-based therapeutic teaching practices that can make the 'big difference' for a vulnerable young person’s learning trajectory. Findings from the impact studies, including an innovative application of flow experience within evaluations of young people’s wellbeing, will substantiate the rationales for introducing therapeutic classroom practices for this vulnerable group of young people. The new training programme itself will provide a substantial base to support the further development of relevant and replicable school-based training. All these strategies are significant to actions arising from the UN Sustainable Development Goal of promoting mental health worldwide.
The LINK Project strategic partnership has explored the power of therapeutic music and arts centred experiences to alter emotional states and engender the positive engagement of self with the world in the context of classrooms in 4 European countries. Through carefully planned teacher training activities / experiences, teachers have been supported in extending their professional capacities as classroom-based therapeutic practitioners who can create safe, enriched, aesthetic and transformative learning environments for vulnerable young people who risk becoming early school leavers because of their poor emotional and mental health. Thus the project has been extending school based provisions for young people who often continue to face exclusion from social and educational opportunities due to personal conditions that result from their trauma histories. The LINK project team has found high levels of such psychological distress exist within each of the project schools. The project is called 'Learning in a New Key' as a reminder that this target group need to experience newly attuned ways of learning in European classrooms. The partnership comprised 4 schools and 5 supporting institutions from 4 different European regions with a spread of proven expertise in teaching, social care, therapeutic intervention, music therapy training, educational intervention, education management and educational research. The partnership has adopted participatory action research approaches that have sustained open ended enquiries appropriate for inter professional engagement in this new professional field. The enquiries have left a legacy of relevant and usable products comprising: a school-based teacher training programme, a first step toolkit to support teachers’ continuing learning, a framework of competences that have emerged through the innovative classroom interventions and impact studies that provide evidence of teachers’ professional learning and young people’s level of engagement in non verbal music and arts-based experiences. These products have supported teachers to frame learning in a way that promotes relational health in schools. A teacher training programme, including both taught and classroom-based elements, has run concurrently in the 4 participating schools. The use of action enquiry approaches has meant that the training programmes evolved in different ways in each country. Music has featured as main medium for creating new modes of interaction, while experiences in drama, dance and movement have also been introduced. The training teams have variously comprised music / arts-based therapists and experienced trainers / researchers from the field of education. Working with the teachers they have adapted and trialled approaches drawn from the repertoires of music and arts-based therapy in the light of young people’s responses and emerging needs during their transitions into learning. The professional learning about these innovatory routines has been supported within shared reflection sessions that have focussed both on the young people’s level of engagement and the teachers’ developing knowledge and skills and changing dispositions. Mutual inter professional learning between the project participants have been facilitated through annual short joint staff training events. During these representatives of the whole project team have successfully shared the training approaches, resources and evidence from the impact studies in the classroom. This European-wide sharing of evidence-based learning has supported preparations for local multiplier events that have engaged a wide range of stakeholders from both education and health. The dissemination process has spread more widely to professional European networks (ECER, ECARTE, ECMT as well as BAMT and SIMCAM) that support innovation and research in these separate fields that are not commonly brought together. The inter professional reports that have been shared are timely in the light of the new UN Development Goal No 3 which outlines the need for systems thinking and integrated problem solving competences to promote good health and wellbeing for all. Findings from the LINK Project are already published in 5 papers in a dedicated Edition of the Journal Education, Society and Culture http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/?q=publication/editions/292. These papers include discussion of evidence from the teacher training programmes, from teachers’ responses about their professional learning and from enquiries about young people’s sensory and relational engagement during music / arts-based activities. The new LINK Project teacher training programmes, associated resources and evidence from the impact studies are already providing a substantial base to support the development of accredited learning programmes ‘Promoting Relational Health in Schools’ in the newly funded continuation ERASMUS + project Sustaining Teachers and Learners with the Arts (STALWARTS)