"I imagine a future where there will be no boundaries, no borders but one land, one religion, humanity, and love. It'll be a world where everyone understands the real meaning of arts and education."

- Supriya, a Slam Out Loud student

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds face a lack of engaging opportunities to build creative confidence and are thereby disempowered to harness their voices to break the cycle of negative outcomes.

Art education has globally proved to build in children skills that help them be more employable and have better life outcomes, yet the average art teacher: student ratio in India is 1:1400 ( according to an RTI filed by Slam Out Loud), giving children less than 20 hours of art education every year.

Slam Out Loud uses the transformative power of performance and visual arts to help build creative confidence (SEL, 21st-century skills) skills like communication, critical thinking and empathy in children from disadvantaged communities. We work with professional artists and e-learning resources to help children build the skills needed for them to dream bigger and create their future. 

Slam Out Loud's response to Covid-19: Arts For All 

With some 826 million (82.6 crore) students kept out of the classroom by the Covid-19 pandemic without access to a household computer, the past few weeks have made our privilege so visual and for us as educators, highlighting the divide of access in digital engagements and learning. At Slam Out Loud, our shifted reality has strengthened our commitment to making children's voices heard everywhere. 

Arts For All uses the arts along with multiple low tech platforms to deliver support for arts-based socio-emotional learning and mental well being to the most vulnerable children at scale. By offering localized, need-sensitive and engaging at-home audio, video, text, and print resources for learners who have limited access to the internet, we aim to lead children towards creative outcomes and building mental resilience during the COVID-19 based school closure period.

Within a few weeks of school closures, we rapidly adapted our interventions to create resources that are free of cost, interactive, and accessible in English and Hindi (and translated into Punjabi, Tamil, Malayalam and Marathi) and made them available through various low-tech distribution channels - WhatsApp, Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) and Radio.

Given diverse levels of access to technology, our intervention is designed to be flexible and to be hosted across different platforms to reach children in the most under resourced spaces.

The Jijivisha Fellowship

The Jijivisha Fellowship is a 5-year relay model wherein professional artists are placed in governmental / low-income classroom every year. Fellows deliver 75 hours of arts-based learning across artforms like poetry, storytelling, theatre and visual arts. We create platforms for children to showcase their talent and each fellowship cycle ends with local and city-wide Art Melas (fairs).

Through comprehensive surveys of various stakeholders, we have seen that: 

• 94% of our students felt that the course motivated them to learn a new art form,
• 85% reported they'd grown (become more self-confident and creative) as a result of taking the class. 

We’ve learnt that the addition of art into education has a profound effect on children’s learning because art never tells them they are wrong. Instead, it provides them with a space where their ideas, feelings and identity are accepted without conditions.

The Jijivisha Fellowship is active in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune, and we are currently developing a hybrid model (with online sessions) to adapt to the current situation.

Voice For All

We use our learnings from the Jijivisha Fellowship to create scalable, vernacular e-learning resources that are disseminated to teachers, students, and communities through Voice For All. 

Voice For All enables access to art education resources through digital platforms and facilitator training. The e-learning content is interactive, vernacular, free of cost, and adaptable to context.

Children create and share original artwork upon completion of e-learning courses through community gatherings or on digital platforms. End-of-program Art Melas (Village/Community gatherings) provide an opportunity for children to showcase their art to friends, family and the larger community.

With Pratham Education Foundation as our education partner for Voice For All, our theatre course was implemented in 950 villages across Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra reaching out to 50,000 children.

To find out more about our work:

• Mid-Day | Art in Your Inbox
• The Swaddle | 14‑Year‑Olds Running Slam Poetry Workshops Prove Arts Education Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought
  
• NDTV | Slam Out Loud Brings Arts Into Education
  
• The Indian Express | Slam Out Loud: Changing the World Through Poetry