Becoming other: social and emotional development through the creative arts for young people with behavioural difficulties

This article focuses on the effects of an arts-based intervention for young people deemed at risk of school exclusion because of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Using a range of qualitative methods, including observations and interviews, the study explored from the perspective of 11 young people (aged 11–16) the potential for creative arts interventions to transform young people’s difficult social situations of development and, in so doing, effect changes in behaviour and way of being. The findings suggest that the interventions that the arts organisation offered these young people provided alternatives to their personal, cultural and historical ways of experiencing the world. In ‘becoming other’ as an artist, experimenting with different art media and trying out creative ideas within a safe environment, the young people chose to try out becoming a different version of themselves. This process of adopting a new identity in becoming an artist enabled some young people to recontextualise their relationship with the social worlds around them. The introduction of an element of socialised play through creative arts interventions helped these young people to negotiate the crisis of a social situation of development. These findings suggest that imagination, invoked through the social situation of play, can help disengaged young people to change their perceptions about the imagined worlds of the future.