Renegades Vacation Youth Music Camp to Set Stage Towards Healthier Minds Through Arts and Entertainment

Sandra L. Blood

When Steel Talks

Trinidad and Tobago - Arts and Entertainment, a necessary strategy to counteract academic failure; social and emotional instabilities!

Renegades Youth Steel Orchestra

Arising out of one of the Ministry of National Security’s 2012 outreach crime prevention programmes in tandem with the University of Trinidad & Tobago (UTT), was a one-day Inductee Seminar at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, that apprised of attracting eight national steel orchestras to facilitate a two-year music workshop for their Positive Adolescent Network (PAN Yard) Initiative – the advantages: to “play, create, perform and record.”

Fashioned after Birdsong Steel Orchestra’s music programme, “The pan yard based Music curriculum seeks to provide a foundational framework in Music, which can be of benefit to all students from ages 7-17 for reasons of musical and / or human social development”, says curriculum development officer, United Kingdom’s Professor of Music at the University of Trinidad & Tobago, Katy Gainham.

Renegades Youth Steel Orchestra

Back in the 1960s-1970s, the second president of the then Steelband Association, the late George “Sony” Goddard made a series of attempts at getting the nation to buy in to the arts as an artery for positive and meaningful life, but that was never to be as music – integral to arts and entertainment – pursued as a career, more so, pan as a structured activity on the school curriculum, was taboo.

But, some 45-odd years, in 2012, Gainham says, “It is well known that students who participate in structured and supportive group activities show fewer behavioural problems over time, with benefits to the community overall including school and home communities”, citing creative engagement in music-making activities as a stimulant to important cognitive centres in the brain, she said established research indicates that such activities, “lead to benefits and improvements in other areas of academic life for the school student.”

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