Utilising Innovative Performing Arts to Reach Learners Who May Struggle
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Written by Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director
Helen champions the arts as a tool for change. Now, as CEO of RYTC Creatives CIC and Give Get Go Education, she mentors young people, creates pathways for them to thrive in the arts, and helps launch successful careers.
Some young people cannot easily explain why a worksheet leaves them cold while a piece of music, movement or drama draws them fully in. It is rarely a lack of ability. More often, it is a mismatch between how understanding is being requested and how a particular young person actually processes, expresses and makes sense of the world around them.
A learner may refuse to write three sentences about a character and then spend forty minutes improvising that character's choices, relationships and motives. Another may struggle to explain an idea verbally but communicate it with remarkable clarity through movement, sound or visual composition. The capability was already present. What changed was the form of the invitation.
Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™ takes this mismatch seriously, using innovative performing arts not as an enrichment activity bolted onto standard teaching, but as a genuine pedagogy in its own right. For learners who struggle in conventional environments, this creates a route into learning that does not require them to first overcome the format that has been holding them back.
Why standard environments do not reach every learner
Standard educational environments are built, understandably, around dominant modes of learning, largely verbal, written, and seated. For many students, this works well. For others, particularly those who think and express themselves through movement, sound, image, relationship or embodied experience, the format can shut down engagement before learning has a real chance to happen.
This is especially true for many young people in Alternative Provision, whose relationship with standard formats may have been shaped by years of struggle. Repeated experiences of not completing work, misunderstanding instructions, or being unable to demonstrate knowledge in the expected form can lead a young person to conclude that they are simply not a learner. The more accurate conclusion may be that they have not yet met a learning environment built for the way they think.
Innovative pedagogy does not lower expectations in response. It widens the doorway through which learners can reach those expectations and expands the ways in which understanding can be built, practised and demonstrated.
What innovative performing arts pedagogy really means
Using performing arts as pedagogy means treating drama, movement, music, storytelling and creative expression as genuine tools for building knowledge, emotional literacy, communication and confidence, rather than as a break from real learning. A young person exploring a concept through role play or collaborative performance is not avoiding rigour. They are accessing it through a route that may be more meaningful and memorable.
Story gives information sequence and purpose. Rehearsal makes repetition expected rather than punitive. Ensemble work requires listening, negotiation and shared responsibility. Improvisation creates a safe place to practise uncertainty. A performance, film, or event can integrate literacy, numeracy, technology, planning, and teamwork into an outcome that matters.
This is learning through doing, but it is not unstructured activity. The pedagogy lies in how the practitioner designs the experience, scaffolds participation, connects creative activity to learning outcomes and gradually increases independence. The arts are not disguising education. They are making education purposeful and accessible.
Recognising learners who may thrive through creative and embodied approaches
Certain patterns can suggest that a young person may respond more strongly to performing arts-based pedagogy than to standard instructional formats:
Struggling to sustain attention during long periods of seated or written work
Coming alive during music, movement, storytelling or drama activities
Expressing ideas more fluently through action, sound, role or image than through writing
Showing strong emotional or imaginative responses to music, characters and stories
Finding purely verbal or written instructions difficult without demonstration
Using gesture or physical examples when trying to explain an idea
Contributing confidently when a task has a real audience, purpose or shared outcome
These signs do not define a learner or suggest that creative work should replace every other form of education. They offer useful information about where engagement may begin and how a broader range of learning can be built from that starting point.
The practitioner's role as a creative guide
Within this approach, the practitioner's role moves beyond conventional instruction to become that of a creative guide, someone who designs experiences rather than simply delivering content. This requires genuine artistic skill, a clear educational purpose and the ability to notice what is happening beneath the surface of a session.
A creative guide recognises that one learner may be ready to perform, another may contribute through sound or lighting, and another may first need to observe before joining in. They adjust the level of challenge without losing the purpose of the activity and make sure that quieter or less visible contributions remain genuinely valued.
This attentiveness separates pedagogy from entertainment. The practitioner is always asking what the activity is building, whether that is understanding of a text, confidence in communication, emotional vocabulary, collaboration, persistence or a specific professional skill.
Key qualities of effective innovative pedagogy
Performing arts based teaching that genuinely reaches learners tends to combine:
Genuine artistic skill, bringing real craft to the work rather than a diluted version of it
Psychological safety, creating conditions where creative risk feels possible rather than exposing
Adaptability, shaping the route around the learners in the room rather than following a rigid script
Purposeful structure, connecting creative activity to a meaningful learning intention
Patience with process, allowing understanding to emerge through exploration and rehearsal
Belief in expressive intelligence, recognising movement, sound and performance as legitimate forms of understanding
Choice and consent, offering valued ways to participate without forcing visibility or personal disclosure
Artistic skill without safety can feel exposing, while enjoyment without purpose may create a good session but little transferable learning. Effective innovative pedagogy holds these qualities together so creativity becomes a reliable educational pathway rather than a one-off activity.
Why this matters for the brilliantly underestimated
Many young people who struggle in standard educational environments are quietly brilliant in ways conventional assessment rarely captures. Their intelligence may show itself in how they move, create, connect, solve practical problems, shape a story or respond to an audience. A curriculum dominated by written and seated tasks may not be designed to notice these strengths, let alone reward them.
Innovative performing arts pedagogy gives these young people a chance to be seen more accurately. A successful scene, an original idea, a technical solution or a meaningful contribution to an ensemble becomes evidence that challenges the story of failure a learner may have carried for years. For the brilliantly underestimated, that recognition can begin to restore both confidence and educational identity.
10 ways innovative performing arts pedagogy reaches learners
Creative engagement matters for far more than enjoyment. When performing arts are used intentionally, with safety, structure and reflection, they can transform both a learner's access to education and an educator's understanding of what that learner is capable of.
The following ten outcomes show how innovative performing arts pedagogy can re-engage learners, reveal strengths that standard formats may miss, and build skills that extend well beyond a single creative project.
It offers a genuine route into learning for non-verbal and multimodal thinkers: Movement, sound, image and performance allow young people to build and demonstrate understanding without relying solely on extended written or spoken language. A concept can be represented through character, rhythm or action. These routes do not replace literacy, they provide a meaningful foundation from which language and reflection can grow.
It lowers the emotional stakes of trying: Creative formats can reduce the fear of getting something wrong that often accompanies formal academic tasks. A first attempt in rehearsal is expected to be unfinished. When mistakes become part of the process rather than evidence of failure, young people become more willing to take the risks through which learning happens.
It builds genuine collaboration and belonging: Performing arts activities require learners to listen, negotiate ideas and work towards a shared outcome. An ensemble becomes a community in which different strengths matter. For a young person who has often felt like the problem in a classroom, discovering that the group genuinely needs their contribution can be deeply significant.
It develops resilience through live and unpredictable processes: Performance rarely goes exactly to plan. A cue is missed, an idea changes, or another person responds unexpectedly. With appropriate scaffolding, learners practise noticing what has happened, adapting and continuing. This develops a practical form of resilience that can transfer into other areas of learning and life.
It gives struggling learners a genuine experience of success: For students who rarely succeed within standard formats, excelling through creative expression can be transformative. Success may appear in a performance, a solved technical problem, a completed design or a contribution that helped someone else. It becomes real evidence of capability rather than reassurance offered from outside.
It strengthens emotional literacy and self-expression: Stories, characters, music and movement create safe forms through which feelings and relationships can be explored. A young person can examine conflict, fear or change through fiction before being expected to speak personally. Over time, this can expand emotional vocabulary, perspective-taking, and communication.
It reveals abilities that standard assessment often misses: A learner may understand motive, sequence, social dynamics, or cause and effect far more deeply than a written response suggests. Watching them build a scene, explain a design choice, or direct a peer can reveal analysis, leadership, and problem-solving that conventional testing did not capture.
It reconnects young people with the idea that learning can be enjoyable: For students who associate education with correction or shame, creative pedagogy can restore curiosity. Fun is not the opposite of seriousness. It lowers barriers, sustains attention and makes repetition possible. Once learning feels worth returning to, wider re-engagement becomes more achievable.
It builds confidence in front of an audience, real or imagined: Performing or presenting can develop courage that transfers into interviews, meetings and self-advocacy. This should always be scaffolded. A learner may begin with a partner, a recorded contribution, a technical role or a small audience. Confidence grows through successful experiences of visibility, not forced exposure.
It gives educators a richer picture of what a young person understands: Creative processes make thinking visible in different ways. Practitioners can observe how a learner interprets information, organises a task, collaborates and responds to feedback. Reflection through conversation, portfolios, recordings or skills checklists then connects the experience to explicit learning and more accurate next steps.
Safety, choice and inclusion must come first
Performing arts can be powerful, but they are not automatically inclusive. Noise, group interaction, eye contact, touch, improvisation and public attention can create barriers for some learners. An innovative approach offers meaningful roles across performance, writing, design, sound, costume, filming, research, technical production and organisation.
Creative work should never pressure young people to disclose personal trauma or perform emotional experiences they do not wish to share. Fiction, metaphor and imagined characters can provide safer routes into difficult themes. Inclusion is not achieved by placing every young person at the centre of the stage. It is achieved when every young person can contribute from a position that is safe enough to allow growth.
From creative engagement to ambitious futures
The strongest performing arts pedagogy does more than re-engage a learner for one session. It opens a pathway. A young person can move from joining a game to shaping a scene, from contributing one idea to leading a rehearsal, or from making a short film to exploring professional roles in production, editing, design or event management.
This is where the RYTC, Education Selection Box and Give Get Go Education work as connected parts of a wider Creative Pathway. Creative arts can support confidence and expression. Personalised academic support can strengthen the foundations around a learner's interests. Careers training can translate emerging strengths into real projects, professional expectations and ambitious next steps.
Conclusion
Innovative pedagogy is not a departure from serious education. It is a recognition that seriousness and rigidity are not the same thing, and that genuine learning can happen through movement, sound, story and performance just as powerfully as it can through conventional formats. For young people who struggle in standard environments, that recognition can be transformative.
Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™ uses innovative performing arts not as an alternative to real learning, but as a genuine pathway into it. What begins as a lesson in movement or performance can become a learner's first real evidence that their way of thinking has value and that education, when designed around them properly, can finally feel as though it belongs to them too.
When a young person engages through performing arts, creativity has not distracted them from education. It may be the first time education has been offered in a language they can fully enter. That engagement can then become the foundation for deeper learning, growing independence and an ambitious future.
To explore more about innovative performing arts pedagogy and the wider work supporting learners through The RYTC, Education Selection Box and Give Get Go Education, visit here.
Creative Pathway Methodology, Of Course You Can!™ serving the brilliantly underestimated.
Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director
Helen Kenworthy’s career embodies the transformative power of the arts, from her early roles in the prestigious West End with Bill Kenwright to her impactful work in regional theatre. As manager of the Oxfordshire Youth Arts Partnership, she created pathways for young people to thrive in the arts, with many going on to successful careers. Now at RYTC Creatives CIC and Give Get Go Education, Helen continues to inspire and mentor the next generation of theatre-makers and community leaders, offering invaluable opportunities for growth and professional development.
