Managing the spatialities of arts-based practices with school children: an interdisciplinary exploration of engagement, movement and wellbeing

Abstract

Background and aims

The paper aims to provoke new pathways within arts and health research that engage with the spatialities of arts-based interventions for building social and emotional wellbeing. We adopt an understanding of social and emotional wellbeing as a situated and relational effect rather than an individually acquired attribute.

Methods

A social scientist and a choreographer both accompanied a mask-making workshop for exploring identity and body language with children aged five and six at a primary school in the North of England.

Results

The collaboration generated an alternative emphasis on movement, rather than behaviour, as the focus of managing spatialities.

Conclusions

The arts practitioner has to facilitate a balance of movements that, within the intended practices of the session, can be categorised as controlled, uncontrolled and improvised. This attention to movement enables a versatile conceptualisation of social and emotional wellbeing that is still situated and relational but also expressive of habituation and improvisation.

This paper sets out to provoke new pathways within arts and health research that engage with the spatialities of arts-based interventions for building social and emotional wellbeing. The term ‘spatialities’ refers to the multiple ways that space affects actions, relationships, material entities, emotions and meanings, and as such have physical, metaphorical and symbolic dimensions. This provocation is developed through two aims. First, the paper makes its own contribution to the field in attending to the management of spatialities through a case study of mask-making with young children. Secondly, the paper explores the value in comprehending spatialities of an inter-disciplinary collaboration across academia and the creative arts, specifically between a social scientist and a choreographer. Certain approaches have dominated evaluations of programmes for social and emotional wellbeing, framing these in particular ways. In exploring the spatialities of arts-based practices, our collaboration offers an alternative framing of the nature of social and emotional wellbeing.

Framing Social and Emotional Wellbeing

Intervention to enhance social and emotional wellbeing in school children has been recognised by the British National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) as highly cost-effective (NICE, 2008; Adi, Killoran, Janmohamed & Stewart-Brown, 2007). A policy assessment of cost-effectiveness necessitates the definition and quantification of dimensions to social and emotional wellbeing; this effectively frames such dimensions as universal and transferable sets of individually acquired skills or competencies (Atkinson & Joyce, 2011). Defining indicators to capture the complexities of social and emotional wellbeing and the associated determinants is an avowed imperative for several national governments, including the United Kingdom (Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi, 2009; ONS, 2011a; ONS, 2011b) and a fast growing research area (see Clarke, Islam & Paech, 2006; Scollon, Diener, Oishi & Biswas-Diener, 2009; Seligman, 2011; Steuer & Marks,2008).

Between 2007 and 2011, primary school intervention for social and emotional wellbeing in the United Kingdom was shaped by the programme for the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning, known as SEAL (DCSF, 2007). SEAL was based on Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence (1995) which posits four main constructs (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management), each associated with individually acquired skills or competencies. SEAL adapted this model to define five dimensions to the programme’s aims: self-awareness; self-regulation in terms of managing feelings; motivation; empathy; social skills. SEAL accorded significant influence to the school environment and as such developed nested sets of interventions with the whole school, targeted groups and targeted individual children (Humphrey et al., 2008; Roffey, 2008). Closely connected to the SEAL agenda, a similar whole school approach characterised the arts-specific interventions of the Creative Partnerships programme (Thomson & Sanders, 2010). A national evaluation of SEAL’s impact in primary schools reported a mixed picture of positive and neutral outcomes. But whilst positive impacts in the school setting were evident, there was a notable lack of impact on parents’ ratings (Humphrey et al., 2008; Humphrey, Kalambouka, Wigelsworth & Lendrum, 2010). This suggests that social and emotional wellbeing not only is shaped by the whole school context but is also profoundly context-specific in its expression. In drawing attention to the place-specificities of both building and expressing social and emotional wellbeing, SEAL implicitly suggests that social and emotional wellbeing is an effect rather than an attribute (Atkinson & Scott, 2011). Effects are inherently relational and situated (Evans & Prilleltensky, 2007; Kesby, 2007; McDermott, 2001) comprising not only relations between people, but also between people and places, material objects and less material constituents of places including atmosphere, histories and values (Prilleltensky, 2005; Spiller, Erakovic, Henare & Pio, 2011). Framing social and emotional wellbeing as relational and situated requires attention to the spatialities of such effects.

An arts-based intervention in the school setting creates a set of social and spatial relations that are extraordinary to the everyday life of the classroom. The arts practitioner is external not only to the classroom and the school as a contracted specialist but also to the teaching profession and its cultures of practice. The arts-based sessions may be literally external to the everyday life of the classroom when held in different spaces of the school. But even when held within the familiar classroom space, there may be different spatial configurations of furniture, pupils and staff. Finally, the activities in which the pupils are engaged during the arts-based interventions are likely to be rather different from the regular curriculum-based sessions. The extraordinary qualities of an arts-based intervention constitute part of the potential for building or even transforming children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Nonetheless, in order to release this potential, the inherent spatialities of arts-based activities need to be recognised and researched in order to develop management practices.

There is almost no literature on the spatialities of arts-based practice in schools and the challenges or opportunities that such spatialities present for the arts practitioner (Sagan, 2008). The abstract nature of space, both literal and metaphorical, affords multiple possible readings of spatialities; our readings offer comparison and collaboration between a social scientist and a choreographer.

Research Design

We addressed our two aims through selecting a case study arts-based intervention in a primary school which we both accompanied. Case studies enable the study of the topic of research within its real-life context and particularly, as in our case, where the distinction between the object of research and the context is explicitly blurred (Yin, 2009). Our primary method was observation which enables attention to the spatialities rather than the verbal experiential accounts dominant in much evaluation research (Leitch, 2006; Richardson, 2000). More specifically, we used unstructured observations, since part of the inter-disciplinary comparison concerned the different interests and focus brought by our different perspectives (Bowling, 2002). The research proposal to accompany and observe the sessions was discussed beforehand with Creative Partnerships, the school and the arts practitioner. The proposal was granted ethical approval through University procedures compliant with the UK Economic and Social Research Council. We were introduced to the children by the class teacher at the start of the first session. Thereafter, we accompanied all sessions observing and, where appropriate, helping out and chatting informally with both children and adults participating in the activities. We both made descriptive notes throughout of our observations and conversations; neither of us used any type of pre-defined structured recording approach. We wrote up our notes independently and provided a piece of writing for each other summarising our observations and reflections. We then met to share conversationally our observations and reflections and to explore the areas of similarity and difference, independent interests and potential contributions to each other’s primary concerns.

The case study was at an infants and primary school in the North of England serving a relatively deprived area, supported through Creative Partnerships and with several arts-based activities on-going at the time. We selected an intervention to explore facial expressions and body language through the use of masks which had an explicit connection to the SEAL agenda for emotional and social wellbeing. An external practitioner, Frances, a professional mask maker, worked with a class of thirty children in year one (aged five to six) across one morning and the whole of a second day. Frances was supported by a range of school staff during the sessions including classroom assistants, the class teacher and a student teacher. The intervention comprised three sessions held in different venues. The first session was a visually-aided exploration of different facial expressions in the year one classroom. The children thought about the basic elements that make up the shape of the human face and discussed what features indicate the various human emotions behind them. Children then drew designs for their masks. The second session involved only half the class who moved to the art-room for the messy business of actually making the masks. Frances demonstrated the rudimentary techniques in mask making through which their drawn designs could be converted into a three dimensional landscape or topography of the face. With reference to their choices about facial expression, adult participants helped the children make their masks, working with play-dough, cling-film, hessian, paste, scissors and boards. The masks were left to dry overnight and then half the class returned with Frances to the art-room the next morning to trim the masks, draw expressive lines and attach ties. After lunch, the whole class took over the library, which had a large central space that allowed movement. The children explored body language through a series of games and experimenting with the masks.

Results

The paper first briefly describes the different perspectives we brought to the sessions. We then discuss themes for managing the spatialities in terms of attention, clustering and dispersal. Next, we discuss more specifically the expression, management and opportunities for different types of movements. The last section draws out the insights brought through the perspective of choreographer and reflects on the implications of different readings of the spatialities of arts-based practice for how we conceive of social and emotional wellbeing. Quotations provided throughout the paper are drawn from the preliminary pieces of writing we produced independently. All names have been changed to allow anonymity.

Observation and Reflection

The social scientist and the choreographer made largely similar observations about the happenings and the dynamics of the sessions. However, our mode of reflecting upon these observations and of presenting them in preliminary writings was different. The paper takes as its starting point the interest of the social scientist in seeking those situated and relational dynamics that facilitated children’s engagement:

‘My focus was, at first implicitly, later more explicitly, drawn to aspects of people-space-activity management, and with an explicit attention to the goals that were intentionally directing the session’ [Social Scientist]

The social scientist drew out four issues related to the spatialities of the arts-based practice: the movement of the children’s attention in onto the activity or out away from the activity; the interactions of the adults with both children, the material space and the material of the masks; the balance, benefits and interaction of controlled and free movements; the importance of atmosphere.

The choreographer’s reflections were informed in at least two different ways to those of the social scientist. First, the choreographer gave more explicit attention to both the materiality of bodies and the flows of movement in the sessions. Secondly, the choreographer’s goals were themselves creative in seeking a translation between observation and reflection that might generate a new form of art. However, despite very different starting interests, we quickly discovered a shared relational approach to our understandings of space, place and people:

‘I am engaging with both real and imagined relationships between people and the specifics of place, the antithesis of the legacy from more traditional approaches where the empty space of the studio and, eventually, the stage … symbolises the premise of the endeavour to begin from nowhere other than with an inner imagining.’ [Choreographer]

The choreographer focussed specifically on the multiplicity of movements, from fingers to group dynamics, and the flows of movements enacted by the children, both as individuals and as a community, in ways that were variously constructive and random and unpredictable. The choreographer interpreted the mask-making as a journey in three episodes: the classroom environment where initial preparation took place; the art-room where the project developed and took root; the library where the results were presented and developed in the early stages of performance. As such, each place, or arena, provided a change of scene and the change between one and the next punctuated the sense of episodic journey. And although no performance techniques in a traditional or formal sense were employed by the children, there was, nevertheless, a sense of spectacle, virtuosity, and involvement that moved them physically, and moved observers emotionally. Moreover, as the children were performing, they were also an audience for each other: watching a friend working adjacently and noticing their progress with their new skills; being roused by the ambient rise and fall of classroom sounds; looking up from deep concentration to see a number of others with heads down in their own world of quiet focus; leaving one’s place and walking to find a pair of scissors, scoping the room en route. Everyone was participating and therefore part of the work, rubbing out the line between performer and spectator.

Despite our different starting points, we found interesting complementarities in our reflections with respect to the spatialities in the sessions and the challenges for management.

Attention, Clustering and Dispersal

An arts-based intervention can only impact children’s social and emotional wellbeing if they first engage and enjoy the activities. The social scientist noted that children’s engagement showed a flux in their attention in and onto the activity or out and away from it; we have termed this ‘attending-in’ and ‘attending-out’. A second type of flux involved a physical clustering of children around adults who served as focal points. These two aspects of the sessions’ spatialities resonate with the choreographer’s interpretation of the children’s observable movements as constituting an ensemble. As an ensemble, the class expressed two prominent modes of physical behaviour: they either clustered together close to somebody and a particular activity or they dispersed to different places in the room, often to start the next task.

Many of the activities drew their attention in extremely well. These included anything that involved doing or making, which engaged them into their own piece of work, and activities that involved answering questions whether by calling out or raising a hand. Attending-in was particularly evident during the sequence when the children were absorbed in the hands-on activity of making their masks. However, there was also a surprisingly high degree of focus when the children were asked to help clear up the play-dough during which hardly any started playing with it as might have been expected; the children concentrated on getting the job done. The children also attended-in very well when exploring facial expressions. Working interactively they put on imaginary faces, taking one out their pocket or catching one thrown to them by another child.

There were three types of activity which at times generated attending-out by some children. Often, although not always, this conceptual moving away of attention was accompanied by a physical moving away from the central site of mask-making. This was not in itself necessarily a problem, but attending-out interrupted the flow of the session for those children, requiring work to draw their attention back in. First, children worked at different speeds in making material things, such as drawing the mask designs, making the play-dough mould and cutting out and drawing in the faces. Frances’ focus was on those doing the particular activity:

‘Those that finished first had nothing specific to do and tended to wander about the room. The lack of focus and engagement is clearly an anathema to normal classroom management and indeed the class teacher on one occasion asked what these children should do once they had finished the task.’ [Social Scientist]

Secondly, there were stages when only one child at a time could carry out the action. Children, therefore, were either waiting for their turn or, once they had had their turn, at liberty without any specific task:

‘Children queued to take turns at feeling the topography and texture of the hessian stretched over the mask mould. Most of them clearly wanted to do this, queued patiently and mostly felt it looking quite serious or smiling slightly. Only a few did the touching rather cursorily or opted out and did not bother. Once done, the children began playing around the spacious room.’ [Social Scientist]

Thirdly, Frances demonstrated some steps in making the mask or exploring body language by using one or two children whilst others observed:

‘Darren is given his mask, goes and looks at himself in the mirror with it. Frances asks the others how does he look, happy, angry, selfish? This process is rather slow, demonstrating with one child at a time which is a little boring for the others. Some of the boys are climbing on one of the helpers. After, Darren starts wandering around looking at all the other things in the room. The class teacher calls them to order several times.’[Social Scientist]

The final session, in the afternoon of the second day, proved particularly difficult in holding the children’s attention. The morning had been interrupted by a faulty fire alarm which had kept everyone outside for over an hour on a dry but windy and slightly chilly day. The disruption combined with being in the less familiar, unstructured and rather warm space of the library and with having the whole class participating, rather than half as originally planned. The combination very likely contributed to the atmosphere of inattentiveness that characterised the final session. Several children frequently attended out and away from the activities and although adults in the room managed their wandering, they had disengaged from the session. Moreover, the session management shifted to getting through, to containing dispersal and keeping the attention of the majority. Those children that chose to attend-out were allowed to do so provided they were not actively disruptive. The rather intangible notion of atmosphere thus emerged as an important consideration in managing spatialities, a notion in this case informed both literally in terms of the windiness of the day and metaphorically in terms of the fragility of the children’s attention.

While the social scientist reflected on these dynamics in terms of attention and focus, the choreographer framed them as clustering and dispersal which constitute the movement strategies for an ensemble in shaping choreographic composition. This approach to choreography has its roots in New York in the early 1970s where a conscious initiative was taken by the Judson Church Dance Collective to abandon previous theatre-based aesthetics. Instead, dancers went out to the streets, to parks and to the open spaces at the top of many of the city’s tall buildings in order to observe, sometimes make interventions, and to choreograph work from these experiences (Banes, 1993; Burt, 2006). Clustering and dispersal provide qualities of spaciousness in a performance work and can give episodic compositional shape. It enables the audience to attend to both individuals and the ensemble, being organic entities involved with a kind of ebb and flow. The adults in the mask-making sessions presented focal points of people and activities around which children gathered as an ensemble. This is particularly true of Frances and to some extent the class-teacher, although less consistently so for other adults. Each instance of ensemble clustering had corresponding instances of dispersal, almost always a journey to apply the techniques and ideas that Frances had introduced:

‘All children walked back to their place in the room to carry out the required activity. The teacher and teaching assistants travelled the room to monitor and encourage progress. As each dispersal often resulted in individual application, all activities then required skills with hands to manipulate materials. All required a degree of concentration for a successful outcome.’ [Choreographer]

Moreover, even in individually enacted activities, children tend to cluster in smaller ensembles around adults for help, support or reassurance.

With respect to managing these processes of clustering and dispersal, attention and focus, two issues emerged. First, although Frances instructed children to raise their hands to answer questions, she often responded to those who called out answers. This disrupted the routines of the classroom that establish order through habit rather than explicit conflict and assertion of authority. Secondly, Frances noticed those calling out who were nearest so that those sitting at the front gained disproportionate attention. On limited occasions, the class teacher and the classroom assistant gently endeavoured to manage this by indicating children who were performing according to the established classroom rules. Frances also on several occasions asked staff to indicate a child who would be good to help her in demonstrating activities or actions. And despite the risk of alienating children who either put up their hands or were sitting further away, their disengagement was not evident. Rather the reverse was the case, that children already attending-out moved themselves away from the central focus of Frances. This was particularly noticeable during the difficult final session.

‘The class have formed three ranks – the first band (most of them) are sitting round at the front watching and more or less engaged. The second band are sitting behind a bit chatting quietly to each other and engaging some of the time. Four are sitting at the edge with one of the helpers; two are sitting at the back and have completely opted out. …. Two boys crawl off from the front bunch to join the two chatting at the back.’ [Social scientist]

These risks to the children’s engagement exposed ambivalence over who was and should be in charge of managing the spatialities. The arts practitioner, Frances, not being a teacher at times seemed unaware of the potential disorder starting to emerge amongst those attending-out. At the same time, the class teacher was clearly sensitive to this being Frances’ session and only stepped in occasionally, usually by asking a question about procedure but on occasions reasserting an authoritative presence over the dynamics. The classroom assistant, who attended on the second day, quietly and independently defined a role for herself in keeping the class under surveillance. Where and when children started to be disruptive, she moved to issue a quiet word and a calming influence:

‘An altercation starts up ….Mrs D. leans across the table to calm her down. Mrs D. also rounds up one of the boys with respect to his behaviour.’ [Social scientist]

This surveillance was done in a discrete manner that was at no time intrusive to the session and effectively functioned to manage the re-engagement of those drifting, both physically and in their attention, outward from the sessions. Other adults, such as a student teacher and a sixth former on work experience, quietly helped individual children. Although they took no direct initiatives in managing the spatialities, their responsiveness to the children who came to them generated small-scale clusterings of attending-in.

Controlled, Uncontrolled and Improvised Movement

Drawing on these observations, we interpret the spatialities of the mask-making sessions as tightly connected to various forms of movement expressed through attending-in and -out, clustering and dispersal. The physical expression of such movements relate to varying forms of control defined in relation to the intents and spaces of the specific session. Controlled movements express situated habits or session-specific instructions. Uncontrolled movements are unrelated or outside the intended practices of the session; they may be controlled and habitual from a different viewpoint such as the contexts of children’s play. Improvised movements respond to the opportunities presented by the sessions for a creative and embodied exploration and as such may be both within and beyond the intended practices of the sessions.

Explicitly controlled and managed movements include a range of disciplined and embodied school habits such hand-raising, lining up and walking sensibly between rooms. Choreographic attention to the routines of controlled repetitive movements was a key element in the influential German Tanztheater associated with Pina Bausch. Bausch’s own interest in the disciplinary, repetitive movements of an habituated socialisation was to draw on the everyday movement that might be familiar to us all, but then to exaggerate and abstract it out of context, providing for a sometimes shocking combination of the familiar with the extraordinary. In her own words, she is ‘not so much interested in how people move, but in what moves them’ (cited in Berringer, 1986, p. 96). In the school setting, habituated movements were mutually constitutive of controlled and familiar spaces. The first preparatory session was based in the year classroom, an organised space where everything had its place – coats and bags, tables and chairs, cupboards, drawers and shelves, a computer screen. The children sat on the floor in a space near the computer screen with the tables behind them creating the impression of a corral. The session was highly structured with visual displays, question and answer elements and exploration of vocabulary that connected to the everyday literacy work of the classroom. The other sessions were in spaces that featured open, unstructured spaces and were less familiar to the children.

The art-room was light, airy and spacious with two long tables at which the children worked As there were specific tasks to be done in making the masks, children followed instructed controlled movements, sitting at the tables, undertaking the moulding, feeling, drawing and cutting. Those children who finished their tasks quickly started to move spontaneously, playing in the open spaces available. Although these uncontrolled movements were not disruptive, they were also not generative of reflective insight on facial or body expression and in this sense are outside the intended practices of the session. The importance of the spatial potential of the room, the degree of familiarity and established movement routines in a room and the expression of different types of movement in terms of control was evident also in the final session based in the library. The children rarely spent extended periods of time in the library. A large central space enabled the creative, exploratory movements intended for the session, but also enabled uncontrolled unintended movement. Moreover, the central open space was surrounded by shelves of books, computers, maps and large windows, all of which attracted some of the children away from the intended practices of the session.

Whilst the process of mask-making involved instructed, controlled movements, these were both complemented and supplemented by creative and exploratory movements throughout the sessions. Even the most specified of tasks and activities required a certain spontaneity and creativity of movement. Thus, in making the masks and drawing the expressions, each child moulded the play-dough and manipulated the pens to their own designs:

‘The children are making decisions about the expression of their mask – happy, overjoyed, angry, sad, confused, serious, and so on – while their hands are busy with the manipulation of the play-dough. Hands rise, fall, pat, poke and rub, fingers press, prick and hold. The play-dough is rolled, shaped, pushed, pressed, scrapped, placed, lifted, squashed, flattened, and plumped up. … some, seemingly almost unconsciously, doodle with left-over play-dough, making for incidental finger stories. One child is singing a made-up accompanying song that includes the words “squishy, squishy, this is squishy”.’ [Choreographer]

Interactions with the furniture of the art-room also gave rise to improvisations in movement. The children stood, sat or knelt on stools on either side of the two long worktables. The worktables were too high for most of the children and they experimented with their relationship with the stools, shifting and changing their positions:

‘Some found a way of gripping the table top, while pushing the stool from four legs to two and creating a balancing act between stability and instability. In some instances this was achieved while continuing to mould and shape the mask. Two children pushed this too far and took a tumble to the floor – both clearly surprised but happily without any injury.’ [Choreographer]

Creative exploration formed a greater part of the arts-based practice in the final session when children undertook several body language activities in a circle in the central open space of the library. Children explored facial expressions or crossed the circle using different walking and moving styles. By contrast to the free movements happily undertaken more privately in making the mask moulds, some children were reserved about performing in front of each other and a number declined to act, or would only do so with a friend. At the same time, managing the controlled movements of this activity was difficult. Maintaining the shape of the circle with thirty children proved almost impossible. Children moved towards whoever was making facial expressions, a clustering effect similar to the magnet effect of Frances in the art-room. But despite the difficulties of the final session, the intentional exploration of the expressiveness of the body and the face prompted much creative movement as children improvised both within and beyond the intended practices of the session:

‘A full-length mirror is brought into the picture. A still body as the masked face peers into it. Another begins to stand in different ways, and appears to grow in confidence and begins to jiggle and dance.’[Choreographer]

Although the study was not an evaluation of the intervention’s success in raising awareness of facial and body language and enhancing social and emotional wellbeing, the children were greatly enjoying their experiences:

‘What do you think, Frances asks. I look lovely, says Bethan. She’s good at doing body language and gets positive feedback and is enjoying it and she really plays it up. Bethan is having a good time.’ [Social scientist]

Frances’ own practice was highly supportive to the children’s efforts; she was extremely positive and encouraging of all actions, questions or suggestions and the children responded well to this through their expression of improvised movements:

‘The joy of individually perceived success resulted in a large number of children returning to find Frances and to share with her their results. Following her feedback many returned again to their place with enthusiasm that was transferred into a run. Usually running in school is discouraged, but in this instance was not commented upon and did not challenge overall levels of positive behaviour.’ [Choreographer]

Moreover, the children showed evident pleasure and happiness in making the masks. They displayed almost no conflict, frustration or unhappiness in making their masks. Only one child expressed a lack of confidence with his mould but even he looked more cheerful given a few tips on further shaping it. And apart from one complaint of a neighbour copying, no arguments emerged. But equally importantly, both in building social and emotional wellbeing and expressing it, the children were largely highly supportive of each other:

‘They have to look at a place in the circle where they want to move to, but to do so have to make a silly noise and use a silly walk. Frances demonstrates with a march and a crow-like noise. The first child to have a go gets a round of applause.’ [Social scientist]

‘Everyone laughs and she would appear to be encouraged and does it more. Possibly not known for this expression of courage, she has big smiles when the mask comes off. [Choreographer]

Spatialities of Arts-Based Practice, Improvisations of Wellbeing

The paper set out two specific tasks: to attend to the management of spatialities in arts-based practices and to examine the value of an inter-disciplinary collaboration between academia and the creative arts for engaging with the spatialities of practice. The paper’s overall aim through these tasks was to provoke new pathways within arts and health research that engage with the spatialities of arts-based interventions for building social and emotional wellbeing.

Our observations indicated that the challenge for the arts practitioner is to find a generative balance between rules and exploration that asserts sufficient order, but not too much, to enable the creative and embodied explorations that may build social and emotional wellbeing. Two practical suggestions emerge from this study. First, school settings have a number of well-rehearsed, habitual routines for maintaining an orderly classroom space, such as hand-raising or forming lines, which provide a basis for order. But it was never clear who amongst the adults present had final responsibility for maintaining this background order. We suggest this might be explicitly discussed between practitioner and class teacher prior to the session. Secondly, engaging the children is an essential part of releasing any potential for building social and emotional wellbeing. On a number of occasions, some children attended-out and risked losing that crucial engagement with the process. Often these occasions reflected particular stages in the process which again might be previewed with the classroom teacher and other adult helpers to devise strategies and activities to draw children back in. The school also needs to be clear on the optimum number of children suitable for the planned activity.

The social scientist tended to conceptualise this balance between rules and exploration in terms of different modes of power connected to modes of behaviour (Allen, 2003). The alternative perspective of a creative artist who read the sessions as a potential piece of choreography led us to interpret the management of spatialities as less about behaviour than movement. With movement foregrounded, the practitioner’s challenge in finding a generative balance between rules and exploration relates to a balance between movements which, in the context of the intended practices, are controlled, uncontrolled and improvised. Controlled movements are essential to structure a space within which to enable improvisation, the movements of exploration that may enhance social and emotional capacities. The uncontrolled movements represent shifts in engagement and attention of the children out and away from the intended session practices and into a different space of reference. The final session was characterised by too much uncontrolled movement which shifted the atmosphere of the session to one of containment rather than one of creative exploration. Arts practitioners, classroom teachers, schools and researchers involved in arts-based interventions need more explicit reflection on how to subtly manage the uncontrolled movements that are outside the intended session practices so as to translate them into potentially generative improvised movements.

We started from a framing of social and emotional wellbeing as an effect that is situated and relational. We have taken this framing further to foreground the management of movement as central to effecting social and emotional wellbeing. As such, two aspects emerge as critical to understanding wellbeing as effected through the daily experiences and encounters of living in any given social and spatial setting: wellbeing as embodied and wellbeing as intersubjective. In this treatment, an embodied wellbeing is a continuous effect of situated, interactive movements which may draw on routine, uncontrolled and improvised repertoires. Framing wellbeing as a continuously produced effect does not in itself render measurement and assessment meaningless. Habituated movements in familiar spaces can generate stability in social and emotional wellbeing, which may constitute a barrier to further development or a platform from which to develop further (Elliott, 2011). But it is the extraordinary relations of people-spaces-activities that enable creative and embodied explorations and improvisations of situated and relational movement that are vital in comprehending how arts-based interventions may help enhance social and emotional wellbeing.

Our overarching aim was to provoke new pathways in arts and health research. All research framings and approaches are situated and bounded by particular intellectual trajectories. Thus our concern with spatialities was shaped by the social scientist’s base in human geography and adherence to a relational definition of space. Similarly, our explorations of movement are informed by two influential choreographic responses to the constraints of previous aesthetics. But there are many other approaches that both complement and contest those drawn on here and we hope this paper will provoke various directions in research to comprehend the spatialities of arts-based practices for social and emotional wellbeing.