Art-based Solutions to Activate Empathy in Schools
- Arts & culture
- Conflict resolution
- Early childhood development
- Tolerance
- Education reform
- Play
- Youth development
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Life Art Vietnam
, HI, Hanoi
, HI, Hanoi
Counselor, Social Worker, Teacher.
Public (tuition-free)
1‐5 years
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Operating for 1‐5 years
The first & only social enterprise in VN with experts in Arts for Human Development, successfully addressing the most abstract problems.
Create an artistic, relaxing, playful environment in which individuals can develop various abstract abilities, including empathy.
3-year impacts assessment:
1. Intensive training of trainers in Facilitating Development through Arts (50 sessions, 150 hrs): 60 participants, 18 100% scholarships. Trainees from those courses have applied what they learnt in their workplace, schools, and projects.
2. Public Workshops: 30 workshops, 450 participants - adults and children. We create a safe setting for individuals to develop creativity and critical thinking - to experiment themselves. We also provide 45 scholarships for selected scholars from difficult circumstances.
4. Me project: A project with The Will to Live Center, working with 25 disabled young people. We organized art-based activities to support their self-worth pursuit, and sharing/learning process. The project attracted considerable attention from the media.
5. Creating Art For Development Net-Work: 40 practical sharing sessions with 40 topics, 70 regular participants.
6. Training on Radical Pedagogy for 50 school head-masters in Hanoi.
After the 6-month program, there will be 20 teachers who can professionally adopt our methods and around 800 students who directly benefit from their teachers' innovation in teaching method. After 1 year, we expect that 200 teachers will understand and be able to integrate our methods into their teaching, and 8000 students will start to benefit from our methods. We expect that needs will arise, and we will organize more similar programs upon requests. Also, this project will capture the media's interest, thus making art-based methods more familiar to the majority of people and changing their traditional "banking model" perspective on education. Only when many people are aware of the necessity and effectiveness of our methods, a real education reform can take place in a large scale.
Train 20 teachers to adopt the art-based methods in schools.
Organize a 6-month program to provide teachers the opportunity to explore, understand and practice our art-based methods.
Support participants in researching and finding new art-based methods that are proper to schooling environment.
Gain support from media, organizations and government.
Make the participants become the trainers, so that the art-based methods will be more and more popular in schools.
Participants monthly report the advantages and difficulties when adopting art-based methods in schools.
Prepare participants for training their colleagues to adopt our methods. Gain support from media, organizations and government.
Monitor participants' training programs and support them to identify and solve difficulties.
I studied Psychology, Sociology and Economics in India. I then came to know a project that used media and theatre for development, which interested me a lot because I always wanted to do something artistic and creative, while still doing work related to Psychology. I decided to apply and won a scholarship to go to University of Winchester to study Media and Theatre as Development. When I came back to Vietnam, I realized that this method for development was very effective; it could be applied to support people to develop their most abstract abilities, regardless of their ages, backgrounds or social conditions. Usually when people are playing and being creative, they are more comfortable to see themselves, approach their own problems and relate to the others. I decided that I would use this method to help improve Vietnam's education system - to create a learning space that is more empathetic, creative and encouraging. That is the reason why I founded Life Art.
The Department of Education and Training of Hai Ba Trung district will be an important partner in our project, since in the past we successfully provided several training programs for teachers from schools in Hai Ba Trung district. We also have contacts of many principals and teachers from kindergartens and primary schools in Hanoi.
Our partners will have the responsibility to ensure the participants' commitment during the program and support them to adopt our methods afterwards. They are also encouraged to give us feedback and join in researching new art-based learning methods.
For the 6-month program, our facilitators all have firm foundation of knowledge and years of experience in art-based learning facilitation skills. Our CEO is holding a Master degree in Media and Theatre as Development from Winchester University. One of our facilitators has been a professional Improvisation Theatre actor for 10 years, and another facilitator is a professional soft skill trainer for children.
We also have a large and committed team of volunteers to ensure that our project will never face a deficit of workforce.
We need a tailor-made marketing plan to popularize the art-based learning methods. Because our method requires the participants to experience to really understand the effectiveness, the usual marketing plan does not work well.