Today South Korean society is grasping an opportunity to gain national competitiveness, evolving into a multicultural one in the multicultural and multiethnic world along with the trend of globalization. It thus needs to provide children from multicul...
Today South Korean society is grasping an opportunity to gain national competitiveness, evolving into a multicultural one in the multicultural and multiethnic world along with the trend of globalization. It thus needs to provide children from multicultural families with social and emotional supports so that they can grow into future members.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an emotional cleansing art play program comprised of music play and food art play on the social skills of children from multicultural families.
As for methodology, the investigator administered an emotional cleaning art play program under a topic and goal for each session to see whether the program would have impacts on the improved social skills of children from multicultural families. A case study method was also employed to observe and analyze changes to their artistic and non-artistic responses in each domain of music play and food art play with the researcher's program log, observation log, videos, and photographs for the demonstration of its influences.
The subjects include 20 children from multicultural families in the first, second, or third grade at M Elementary School as a multicultural base in G City, Gyeonggi Province. They were divided into the experiment and control group, each of which contained ten children. An emotional cleansing art play program was implemented to the experiment group over total ten sessions, each of which lasted 90 minutes, twice per week from October 2 to November 15, 2013. A survey was conducted with both the experiment and control group in a pre-test before the program, post-test after the program, and follow-up study one month after the end of the program. The questionnaire items covered the general characteristics of children from multicultural families and a sociality inventory for children. In addition, the study measured the satisfaction of the experiment group with the emotional cleaning art play program each session.
With the SPSS Win 20.0 statistical program, collected data were put to frequency, percentage, and Cronbach's α to examine the demographic characteristics of the experiment and control group and to mean and standard deviation to examine the social skills of children from multicultural families. Furthermore, t-test was carried out to compare and analyze the pre-test, post-test and follow-up study results, and means were obtained to examine the experiment group's satisfaction with the emotional cleansing art play program each session.
The main implications of the results are as follows:
First, the focus and control group did now show a statistically significant difference for social empathy, self-regulation, assertiveness, and collaboration prior to the program. Post-program results, however, show a discrepancy in empathy (t = 2.365, p <.05), self-regulation (t = 3.638, p <.01), assertiveness (t = 2.216, p <.05), collaboration (t = 3.091, p <0.01 ), lead to a statistically significant difference of the general social scale (t = 3.347, p <.05). Further, latter test results showed further statistically significant differences in empathy (t = 3.175, p <.01), self-regulation (t = 4.296, p <.01), assertiveness (t = 3.127, p <.01), collaboration (t = 2.475, p <.05), leading to a total social scale (t = 3.368, p <.01). Thus, if a child's focus group, after conducting a post-program survey, appeared to be in heightened emotions, the multicultural arts play program is indeed effective in improving children's social skills.
Second, the application of emotion in the program process considers the child’s behavioral change with respect to the qualitative analysis of observed records, and confirms a positive change in the nature of peer relationships.
Third, the emotional satisfaction for the focus group is relatively higher than for the control group.
Those findings suggest that the emotionally cleansing arts program is highly influential in helping to improve a multi-cultural child’s social skills. Analysis shows that expression through art allows for cooperative activities, and gradual improvement in all following areas of empathy, self-regulation, assertiveness, collaboration, and overall social interaction.
This emotionally cleansings arts programs are aimed at improving overall social skills for children through the use of qualified instructions from facilitators utilizing the mediums of instrumental music and food ingredients. Participants will be able to work in a free environment, express themselves freely, and through reconfiguration of empathy, self-regulation, assertiveness, and collaboration, improve their overall social skills.
Eurhythmics of music play, coupled with food art play, form the much-needed multi-cultural arts play program meant to improve children’s social skills through emotional cleansing. Given that a comparison of this study to general children requires assumptions, a follow-up study regarding a different set of experimental group will be needed.
Keywords
emotional cleansing art play, music play, food art play, social skills of children, Sookmyung eurhythmics, food art therapy