Under The Same Sky

"In this project, our target group was the students;•whose parents are divorced or separated•who have emotional problems•who have behaviour problems•who have difficulty expressing feelings in words•who are low academic achievers with low self-esteem and experience little school successEach year, thousands of children and teens in Europe experience divorce or separation of their parents. The process or separation is challenging life transition for children and teens. During a divorce, they often feel a variety of conflicting emotions. Anger, sadness, worry, relief, confusion, guilt, embarrassment, loneliness and nervousness - these are all common emotions that these children or teens experience when their parents divorce or separate. Besides, they have sleeping problems, decreased self-esteem as well as difficulty in school work and other activities. As a result, all these trouble can be manifested as withdrawn or aggressive behaviour. The students, who have experienced the problems explained above as a result of their parents divorce or separation, are defined as at-risk students. They mostly cannot adopt social life among peers at school because of either their low self-esteem or aggressive behaviours. In this project, we aimed that these at risk students increase their self-esteem in positive and improve their social skills through art and drama activities. Because, if the student is not able to cope with the problems and does not get enough support, he/she will not feel himself/herself as a part of the school and early school leaving may occur. Our objective was to provide these students with understanding and support in order to prevent early school leavings. The activities in this project aimed to support these at risk students at our schools and help them work through feelings, concerns and frustrations regarding the divorce.We planned to explore the definition of ""at risk"" students, whose parents are divorced and the possibilities that involvement in the art and drama can aid these students to navigate the dangerous pathways away from failure and risky behaviours. One of the shortcomings of traditional education structure is that relationships with teachers may be caring, but they are not easy to sustain. At-risk need relationships that are both caring and stable. They need to build a sense of trust and have time to communicate the complexity, frustrations, and positive aspects of their lives in and out of school. We know that only after creating a strong relational base will an adult have the platform to be a source of enduring and cherished advice to a student. We, the teachers took part in the project, planned to earn it by building a relationship through one to one interviews, art and drama activities.The aim of our project was to place art and drama as a strategic part of learning process and to show that the skills that children of divorce glean from art and drama experience have an impact on both individual and the whole school culture. We suggested that for these at risk students, art and drama would offer solutions to issues they face; these issues include problems involving personal space, patience, self-esteem, completion of work and complex thinking. Art and drama allowed at risk students to represent externally what takes place internally. These activities placed students in a leadership role when they might not be chosen as a leader in a traditional academic school setting.During the two years period of the project, we made 13 sessions with our target group of students. These sessions included art and drama activities. Using a specifically prepared curriculum to address the needs of kids in divorce, children did activities through play and creativity to help express and talk about their feelings. The Art and Drama teachers had decided the activities, that we planned to use in the project, by the guidance of counsellors at our schools and Latvian partner. These activities helped these students to express themselves in a society, raise their self-esteem, share their feelings, control their anger and, most importantly, to see that there are many people with the same problem in different countries too.At the end of the project, we expected ""at risk"" students whose parents are divorced:•Increased possibilities using art and drama for social, emotional and physical development of students at risk;•Increased possibilities to communicate with pupils with similar situation/ interests from other participating countries;•Increased competence in foreign languages and greater understanding and responsiveness to social, linguistic and cultural diversity through communicating with pupils with similar interests from other participating countries;•More positive attitude regarding school education and the role of education in the future career, contributing to the diminution of drop-out rate.The results are uploaded on the project website and are free downloadable."