Designing an expressive arts therapy curriculum to support the social-emotional learning skills of Syrian refugee students in Turkey: a validation study

Abstract

The researcher used aspects of instructional design in this study to develop and evaluate an eight-week curriculum designed to help improve social-emotional learning (SEL) skills of Syrian refugee students in Turkey. In this aspect, the researcher incorporated a technique called Expressive Arts therapy (EXA) into the curriculum and provided a clear guideline to those wanting to implement EXA in a more purposeful and rigorous way in the school setting. To ensure the validity of the curriculum, a mixture of open-ended and a five-point Likert scale questionnaire was administered to investigate the perceptions of a group of experts from different fields about various aspects of the curriculum. Data analysis involved descriptive statistics of the quantitative data along with content analysis of the participants’ written comments. the results of this study indicated that the EXA activities in the curriculum were feasible, effective and implementing this curriculum in the school setting would be beneficial to promote SEL skills of Syrian refugee students.