Engaging Emotions through Art: Young People Tackling Different Learning Environments

In recent decades, the arts have gained great relevance in the social sciences as a tool for exploring social complexity, cultural diversity and social inclusion, including their affective implications (Bourdieu; Di Maggio; Inglis). In the field of education, too, there is a renewed interest in the arts and arts-based education because they challenge traditional ways of teaching and learning in formal and informal educational settings. In particular, art is seen as a valuable means of promoting social inclusion in multicultural contexts (Martiniello; Clover).

Our paper aims to explore the relationship between young people, emotions and arts education in formal and informal educational settings by presenting qualitative and visual data collected as part of the European research project "The Cultural Literacies' Value in Europe" (Clivie), which aims to improve our understanding of the value of cultural literacy through arts education for social inclusion. The target group of this project are young people (10-18 years old) who experience overlapping disadvantages in different areas and to different degrees (migrant background, low socio-economic status, disability). In particular, adopting the cultural theory approach to emotions (Hochschild, Illouz), which examines how different social contexts influence young people's emotional experiences, we analyse the results of four Italian case studies - two formal educational settings, i.e, two schools in the periphery of Milan and two informal educational settings, i.e. two third sector institutions dealing with ethnic and disability issues - in which emotional cartography is used as a creative methodological tool to promote the emergence of feelings, values and emotions that foster cultural literacy and awareness of difference. We are comparing experiences in these two types of educational settings in order to better understand how different learning environments, using art as a participatory technique, can shape young people's emotional expression and promote cultural understanding and inclusion.