Forge Festival is a youth-led extra-curricular activity developed with people in school and community settings, supported by and co-created with professional artists leading to a theatre festival in the North-West of England. Responding to the climate crisis, young people developed original performances expressing their views to ignite community dialogue. In this paper, we share our insights into how this project fostered positive development, emotional wellbeing and environmental and sustainability learning.

For some years, the literature has recognised the positive effects of after-school programmes on young people (Dworkin et al., 2003; Eccles et al., 2003; Hansen et al., 2003). As argued by Berger et al. (2020), taking part in after-school programmes would be a developmental space for young people, as it “fosters both individual and collective growth, socioemotional wellbeing, and a positive identity configuration process” (p. 7); after-school programmes would promote academic success (Guilmette et al., 2019), empathy and community building (Kirchhoff et al., 2024), identity formation (Arnold, 2017), sense of responsibility (Larson et al., 2019) and sense of purpose (Larson, 2020), social competence (Hurd & Deutsch, 2017) and socioemotional skills (Berger et al., 2020), and overall better subjective wellbeing (Ditzel et al., 2022) and mental health (O’Flaherty et al., 2022).

On top of this, following Busby et al. (2022), theatre doesn’t only offer young people a venue for future career exploration or artistic development: it is a tool for improving youth’s life, self and peer connection, and their social and political engagement with the wider local and global society. Taken together, applied theatre extracurricular activities with young people could serve to join the individual and collective aspects of knowledge and sense-making (Shapiro, 2020), as they build upon and expand the young people learning trajectories, their life stories and identities, and their hopes and visions of the future (Gallagher & Kushnir, 2022).  

With this idea, theatre becomes a particularly interesting space to address the challenges and emotionality raised by climate change as it allows for young people to respond to this crisis through collective imagining and creativity in a personal small-local and large-global scale (Gallagher et al., 2022a; 2022b). As part of the political and societal purpose of theatre as an artform (Busby, 2022), a key issue that has been identified in applied theatre for addressing climate change with young people is emotional aspect of learning and development.

Exemplified in the emotion of hope, Maria Ojala (2017) has stated that “[h]ope is a positive emotion and an existential must that needs to be cultivated, by showing that another way of being is possible, by encouraging trustful relationships and by giving young people the opportunity to concretely work together for change” (p. 82). In a sense, the urge is for applied theatre with young people to take a critical-affective stance (Gallagher et al., 2016), as it would require “taking affect seriously, recognizing its constitutive value in the production of thought” (p. 229).

Thus, the merits of any extra-curricular programme would be to promote positive youth development and emotional wellbeing, while also wholly supporting the achievement of the learning goals set that give meaning to the programme. To that end, this study explores the emotions of the young people taking part in the programme conducing to the Forge Festival, to gain some insight into the young people wellbeing as it progressed over time. This paper will (a) showcase how these changed over the course of the programme, towards an increasing sense of emotional wellbeing as posited in the literature, and (b) exhibit the changes in the emotionality regarding learning and change in this setting, as it should increasingly present emotions that support learning.

This research followed Thornberg’s Informed Grounded Theory (2012), as both the literature and the professional experience of the authors offered a fairly strong suggestion that the programme would be successful in achieving its objectives. Thus, the methodology was framed as documenting the change as it was happening throughout the sessions. Firstly, the authors produced an independent review of the literature to identify key developmental achievements typically associated with these programmes. A list of concepts was produced, complemented by the accumulated professional experience of the team. After several research meetings, a final list was produced with 26 concepts. Inspired by Thornberg & Charmaz’s (2014) Theoretical Thematic Analysis, preliminary theoretical grouping was done to ensure that enough concepts were selected. Four broad categories arose, namely Positive Emotions related to Wellbeing, Negative Emotions related to Wellbeing, Positive Emotions related to Learning, and Negative Emotions related to Learning. The latter two categories roughly relate to the research done in epistemic emotions (Muis et al., 2018; 2021; Nerantzaki, Efklides, & Metallidou, 2021). Data production took place in four out of the ten programme sessions, where the young people in all six groups in attendance picked up to five concepts out of the 26 options. A total of 68 young people took part in the study and 1008 data points were collected. Additionally, seven open questions were asked to four of the six groups at the time of data production. Each group was asked the same questions twice, once in time one or two, and then again on time three or four. The answers were transcribed and stacked on a spreadsheet. From the seven open questions, only five were found relevant to complement the data produced with the concept selection. Altogether, these questions produced data that specifically addressed the young people self-perception of their development as young artists and their views on the programme’s relationship with their personal development. Jointly, they present a view of the impact of such an extra-curricular programme in the lives of young people as it supports and promotes their wellbeing, learning and personal and collective transformation.

Generally speaking, the data supports previous research as the emotions related to positive wellbeing became more prominent as the engagement with this extra-curricular programme progressed. First, the data self-reported by the young people offered a view of the change in the emotional landscape of the group as the programme developed. With the data at hand, the studies that propose that extra-curricular activities foster better subjective wellbeing, mental health, belonging, peer relations, identity development, amongst others, can be further supported. From a relatively high baseline, improvement was shown through the data, while concepts that related to negative emotions decreased over time. The second set of data produced through qualitative questions and answers also supports this conclusion. All in all, the results showcase that, although emotions that could be referred to as positive relating to wellbeing and to learning were higher even at time one, they got increasingly higher over the course of the programme, while those that could be referred to as negative relating to wellbeing and learning got increasingly lower from time one to four. With respect to Emotions related to Wellbeing, the participants expressed feeling increasingly more connected to their peers and wider community through the programme, they felt more creative and supported in their creative endeavours, and thus supported in their identity exploration. Thanks to the Forge Festival, they felt a change in how their voices were heard; due to the public performance aspect of the programme, the young people felt that their voices were amplified enough to be heard strongly by their families and communities, as well as by key stakeholders of the area who attended the Festival. All things considered, it could be stated that the wellbeing and mental health of the young people who took part on this applied theatre programme improved over its course.

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