Using the Arts to Empower Adolescents

Prof. Shantanu Khanna is engaging the arts to empower adolescents to navigate their personal, social, and academic lives. Foundational skills, including both soft skills and essential life skills, have been shown to be strongly predictive of success in later life outcomes. These skills include emotional regulation, communication, self-efficacy, critical thinking, collaboration, and conflict resolution, among others. While a growing body of evidence suggests that these skills are malleable, identifying the optimal pedagogical methods for imparting these competencies remains an active area of research. In an ongoing project in India, Prof. Khanna, together with his Policy School colleague Prof. Nishith Prakash and others, is examining how a novel and multifaceted curriculum using a theater-centered pedagogy impacts middle school students’ acquisition of crucial foundational skills.

In this intervention, the researchers are partnering with Rang Kaarwaan, a local non-profit organization (NGO) in the poor region of Champawat (Uttarakhand, India). Their approach uses arts and theater to empower adolescents to navigate key aspects of their lives. Although theater-based techniques have been employed by NGOs and activists, their application in educational contexts remains rare. The novel pedagogy involves a set of interactive games, exercises, and techniques designed to promote ‘problem-posing’ dialogue among participants. The intervention consists of a 10-session curriculum. Each session lasts for 90 minutes, delivering approximately 15 hours of instruction over a six-month period. The curriculum is structured in three stages, focusing on developing the self, surroundings, and community. By integrating these components, the curriculum strives to provide a comprehensive approach to skill development . 

To establish causal relationships between the intervention and student outcomes, the researchers have conducted a clustered randomized controlled trial. The experimental design splits 96 public schools equally into treatment and control schools. The baseline sample consists of 3,909 students in grades 6 through 8. Specifically, the researchers will measure the effects of this intervention on several key outcomes, including socio-emotional skills, psychological well-being, academic performance, communication, negotiation skills, and critical thinking abilities. The results are likely to offer valuable insights for educators, policymakers, and researchers seeking innovative strategies to improve student engagement and learning outcomes across diverse educational settings.  

The endline surveys for this project will be completed by February 2025. This project has been conditionally accepted at the Journal of Development Economics based on a pre-results review.