The acquisition of emotional intelligence, empathy, social awareness, and relationship skills is known as Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). The arts offer a wide array of foundational opportunities for education, but the degree to which schools benefit from these opportunities is relatively unknown. Salvin (2002) claims that policymakers focused too much solely on scientific research and ignored the arts. School administrators' increased emphasis on state-assessed educational outcomes, especially standardized tests, resulted in huge cuts in the arts and also other non-tested core subjects (Bassok et al., 2016; Dee et al., 2013; Gadsden, 2008; Murnane & Papay, 2010; West, 2007; Yee, 2014; Bowen & Kisida, 2021). As a result, implementing scientifically based arts research studies has been tough; however, these initiatives are extremely crucial to the conservation of the arts in schools. In previous studies using Randomized Control Trials (RCT), the findings provided evidence that the arts education is able to improve educational outcomes (Bowen et al., 2014; Bowen & Kisida, 2021; Greene et al., 2014; Kisida et al., 2014; Kisida et al., 2016). These studies discovered that arts learning improves students' critical thinking, discipline, writing achievement, compassion for others, and future arts engagement. However, these studies were limited by relatively short evaluation periods and circumstances that may not make good assumptions in more common, everyday educational settings.

The educational theorists Dewey (1934), Farrington et al. (2019), and Nagaoka et al. (2015) suggest that learning is a social and emotional process. Students develop socially and emotionally in compassionate settings that provide opportunities for active learning through direct interaction with the world and reflection on their experiences. The arts offer effective educational opportunities for students to connect with and contribute to society, reflect on their own and others' experiences and cultures, and foster social and emotional learning (Eisner, 1992; Ladosn, 1994; Bowen & Kisida, 2019). Schools can build trusting relationships with students by providing contexts that support social and emotional learning and development, which can contribute to a range of positive educational outcomes (Deasy, 2002; Farrington et al., 2019; Fiske, 1999).

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has identified five important competencies that students must master for successful SEL programs.

• Self-awareness, which involves appropriately evaluating one's emotions, desires, beliefs, and abilities while retaining a firm sense of self-assurance.
• Self-management, which involves controlling one's emotions to cope with anxiety, developing selfcontrol, and persevering in the face of adversity, establishing and monitoring progress toward personal and academic goals, and expressing emotions adequately.
• Social awareness, which involves putting oneself in the shoes of others, empathizing with them, recognizing and appreciating individual and group similarities and dissimilarities, and recognizing and using the family, school, and community resources.
• Relationship management, which involves developing and maintaining good health and rewarding cooperative relationships, resisting unnecessary peer pressure, avoiding, controlling, and tackling interpersonal conflict, and seeking assistance when needed.
• Responsible decision-making, which involves making decisions relating to ethical standards, safety concerns, appropriate social norms, appreciation for others, and the likely consequences of different actions, and applying decision-making skills to academic (Dangerous Discipline, 2016). Figure 1 shows the five important SEL competencies that are essential to the teaching and understanding of social-emotional learning within classrooms.

Figure 1. The Five Important SEL Competencies Based on CASEL Framework

Elias (2003) states that social-emotional development, also known as emotional intelligence, is a set of skills that students must develop to be successful in both school and life. These skills include the ability to collaborate with others, be efficient, and become productive members of society. Social and emotional skills are essential to encourage in schools because children develop through learning that involves touch, cognition, and the soul. When students develop these skills, their academic achievement improves, and they become more motivated. When asked about their aspirations for their children, both parents and teachers want their children to be well-balanced and well-adjusted individuals who are confident in themselves and their strengths and who possess the skills to succeed in social and emotional intelligence.

Part of the issue with social and emotional development in schools is that there is often an unconscious bias. Subjects in arts education are not given as much importance as math, reading, or other subjects that provide hard data. When emotional and social skills, creative thinking, and critical thinking are categorized as soft skills, they are often considered less important than other skills that they learn in school. Claxton et al. (2016) claim that soft skills have consistently been sidelined as a result of the nation's focus on testing and data collection since they cannot be measured by a test and, in fact, require face-to-face interaction and observation to see development. It has been demonstrated that a lack of social and emotional skills follows children throughout their lives. Hetland (2013) states, "If education focuses primarily on knowledge acquisition, students are unlikely to learn to behave as democratic citizens must, that is, as active, informed, ethical participants in shaping collective futures."

A research study by Jones et al. (2015) found that the best way to measure students' social-emotional skills is at the beginning of the school year, which can be a good indicator of their strengths and weaknesses in their development. At the same time, it assists in identifying students who may require interventions. Students who participated in this study showed that they lacked socialemotional skills early in their schooling, which led to issues with the law, substance abuse, academic struggles, and difficulties in the workforce.

Teachers are under pressure in the classroom to prepare students for state or national testing, rather than being given the freedom to teach the whole student. Furthermore, many schools strive to incorporate more core subjects into their school day, mostly at the expense of classes such as visual arts, music, band, and physical education, areas where children are more free to be children and stretch their minds. Kalish (2009) states that "more math and reading instruction may sound like a good thing, that is, until it is realized what is being eliminated to make room for it." It is only when students are physically present and mentally ready to learn that they can make the most of the opportunities schools provide (OECD, 2013).

1.1 The Roles of Arts Education in Supporting Students' Social and Emotional Development

Dickenson (2017) conducted a study to investigate how art education contributes to students' social and emotional development and well-being. The study reviews the different components of social-emotional development and the various ways of thinking that can help students develop these skills. It provides a summary of the studio habits of mind, including developing craft, understanding art worlds, engaging and persisting, envisioning, expressing, observing, reflecting, and stretching and exploring, and shows how these behaviors promote social-emotional development. The study also discusses the benefits of creativity and child-centered learning for students as artists and individuals. In conclusion, the study highlights the importance of the visual arts in schools and how they contribute to the overall success of students in preparing for the future. Additionally, alternative solutions for schools and districts to promote the visual arts and student well-being are presented.

Müller et al. (2018) assert that comprehensive arts programs were designed to promote Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in young children with social cognitive challenges and report on student achievement. As part of their social studies curriculum, a SEL set of arts instructions was included throughout the students' lessons on a weekly basis over the course of one academic semester. The research was conducted by employing an exploratory study of outcomes through a quantitative and qualitative research design. A behavioral checklist and several social skills measures were used to quantify outcomes for 16 focus students at baseline and again at the end of the program. Qualitative data were collected through end-of-program interviews with 27 key stakeholders. From the findings, the students made good progress based on the checklist and social skills measures. The qualitative data presented used arts programming to help students grow in all five of CASEL's SEL domains.

Farrington et al. (2019) investigated the relationship between arts education and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) by developing a theory of action to describe the nature of the relationship. The theory proposes that the arts learning experience has the potential to promote children's development of SEL competencies. The theory focuses on the artistic and social-emotional aspects that occur concurrently. Just as a student can develop good or bad piano habits, they can also develop good or bad social-emotional habits. The social-emotional components of arts activities must be cultivated into longterm competencies, just as the art practices must be cultivated into long-term competencies through guidance and instruction. The findings suggest that arts education settings have a lot of potential for students to develop SEL. Learning literary or media arts, visual arts, theater, dance, or music has a significant intrinsic effect on young people because it exposes them to creative humanistic experiences and possibilities for intensive skill development.

According to Casciano et al. (2019), there is little difference between arts-integrated education and social emotional learning for disabled students. A case study of Everyday Arts for Special Education (EASE), a federally funded arts integration program, is used to distinguish the processes by which arts-integrated teaching promotes engagement, self-control, interpersonal skills, and leadership among special education students. To present a conceptual model for understanding the impact of artsintegrated education on student social-emotional outcomes, observations and interviews were conducted. Arts integration helps to improve students' social-emotional outcomes in two distinct ways. It is by providing school teachers with simple, easy-to-implement activities that clearly promote growth on one or more social-emotional competencies and by providing school teachers with an approach that encourages student engagement, which in turn increases social-emotional growth. It is concluded that arts integration must be adopted and applied in order for classroom learning to be effective.

The social-emotional components of these art practices are the building blocks for developing social-emotional skill sets, just as daily art practices are the foundations for developing arts competencies (Farrington & Shewfelt, 2020). Art and music have a powerful influence on the lives of young people. Participation in the arts can improve Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) by cultivating goal setting and decision making, increasing empathy, and building relationships. A "SEL" and "Connect with Kids" program that concentrates on social and emotional skill development with the use of visual arts and music was implemented in a northeast urban high school. The study included 304 high school students in total. Students in eight classrooms received the intervention (n = 143), while students in ten other classrooms (n = 161) served as the comparison group and did not receive the intervention. The typical adolescent was 14 years old, white, and female. When compared to the comparison group, the "Connect with Kids" program showed an increase in positive social and emotional behaviors among students. This study's implications show that the integration of SEL programming in music and art in schools promotes an ongoing program evaluation of unique SEL programming among students in high school (Mogro-Wilson & Tredinnick, 2020).

Lee and Lee (2021) found that students' social-emotional capacities are very important for their civic development. It is also believed that the arts are known to be a meaningful pedagogy of social-emotional learning. They studied the effects of art education on social-emotional learning among primary school-going children in a rural village in Kenya using a quasi-experiment with a mixed method. The collaboration between village insiders and outsiders showed that appropriate approaches to art education are needed. In a recent study, Hanning (2022) proposed Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) as a framework to deliver a choice-based curriculum that supports students' socialemotional growth. TAB was incorporated as a pedagogical starting point to scaffold student learning of artistic behavior within meaningful concepts. A curriculum based on flexibility and resilience was designed for students to explore pandemic art-making in an uncertain environment. The findings reveal that TAB certainly helped students to value concepts over media in their artworks by first developing concepts based on personal reflections and then choosing media to visually communicate their concepts in an artistic way. Students used a variety of mediums in their artworks to address social-emotional learning with a conceptual prompt.

1.2 The Role of Schools in Supporting the Arts Education

Social Emotional Learning (SEL), like the arts, has been around since the beginning of time. SEL refers to the ability to identify and manage emotions about oneself and others, to be organized and set goals, to solve problems and make decisions effectively, to establish positive and productive relationships with others, and to handle difficult situations competently. This problem is organized from broad to specialized, beginning with national policy and ending with practitioner-level implementation at local level. Instead of dividing articles by arts content area, the articles are organized by policy level, with each art content area addressed within each level. This problem should be read as a whole, outlining the various levels of explicit connection and the possibilities for a much more comprehensive relationship between arts education and social emotional learning (Edgar & Elias, 2021).

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and Ingenuity (2017–2019), a Chicago-based arts education advocacy organization, collaborated to investigate the relationship between arts education and social-emotional development. In 2019, the Consortium published a report that recommended a theory for how arts learning experiences can address young people's social-emotional competencies by combining artsspecific research with various disciplines of literature on child and adolescent development. The theory of action covers what is commonly referred to as arts education, which includes a theater production, playing the violin in a school orchestra, or painting a mural in an afterschool arts program. This comprises a number of daily experiences or artistic practices, such as auditioning, practicing a musical instrument, or learning to mix colors. This review argues that each of these daily art practices has socialemotional components. As a result, art practices provide potential for both artistic and social-emotional learning.

Edgar and Morrison (2021) argue that the findings support further research into the relationship between the arts and SEL, exploring examples of SEL instruction in the arts and developing evidence of the influence of arts education on SEL. The function of SEL in arts education is still being discovered, and evidence that the arts can provide a suitable environment for SEL is expanding. The study provides an overview of the different policy levels related to SEL and arts education, offer another example of artistic SEL integraton (New Jersey Arts Education and SEL Learning Framework), elaborate on policy implications and advantages, and conclude with approaches for using SEL as an advocacy tool for arts education.

Yorel and Halverson (2021) suggest areas and types of research that are needed, and they share the University of Wisconsin-Madison Community Arts Collaboratory as a model of mixed-method strategies and results for developing and implementing assessments of arts SEL outcomes. Four different programs and curricula in creative writing, drama, dance, drumming, and visual arts are available at the Collaboratory. The implications of this research are for school administrators and educators who are looking to evaluate and understand studentderived arts SEL data, and policymakers looking for research-based support for allocating more funds for the arts as powerful sources of SEL data in terms of teaching and learning. Another study, conducted by Eddy et al. (2021), looked at how educational policies in various regions of the United States provide varying opportunities for using arts disciplines and pedagogies for SEL teaching. Each portrait interfaces with SEL to teach competencies and report improvements in personal emotional growth, social awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving, information management, global innovation, and artistic competency. Reading these portraits reveals justifications for the need to improve interpersonal collaboration, verbal, nonverbal, and aesthetic communication, collaborative creativity, and cultural awareness in teacher education, curricular design, and school policy.

Extrinsic benefits of arts learning, such as Social Emotional Learning, are sometimes cited by arts education advocates. This study investigates whether and how the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS) in dance, media arts, music, theater, and visual art could integrate with the SEL standards adopted by the state of Illinois, which have been modeled by other SEL standards. A group of arts education experts coded 15,500 intersections between arts standards and SEL objectives. They discovered a lot of indirect alignment between the NCAS and SEL objectives, but direct alignment was uncommon. Because the types and degrees of alignment differed by discipline, broad discussions of arts education that assume similar types of SEL occur in the same ways in all arts disciplines are questionable. Given the broadly indirect alignment of NCAS and SEL objectives, educators who want to pursue both arts learning and SEL goals must engage in conscious planning to ensure both types of learning occur. From a theoretical, standards-based standpoint, it appears unlikely that SEL will occur naturally in arts learning scenarios without deliberate planning. While it is acknowledged that there is potential for intentionally structured lessons to promote both arts learning and SEL, they warn against promoting arts education programs based solely on assumed extrinsic benefits such as SEL (Omasta et al., 2021).

Hellman and Milling (2021) found that Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is a framework that unifies essential life skills such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationships, and responsible decisionmaking. This article investigates the intersection of SEL competencies with national accreditation policy, state standards, and course descriptions using curricular mapping and content analysis. The findings revealed conceptual connections with varying degrees of alignment but no mention of SEL. SEL intersected with foundations, development, communication, relationship building, curriculum, and improvement in arts accreditation standards. This paper advocates for a stronger link between arts teacher education and SEL in arts teacher education policy, with a focus on teacher identity, mental health awareness, self-awareness, selfmanagement, diversity, and social justice. The study recognizes the potential for improving K–12 arts learning.

The connections between the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, arts education, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) have largely gone undiscovered. The aim of this article is to explore how P-12 arts educators can use ESSA to support new and existing SEL efforts and how SEL can help P-12 arts educators meet the goals of ESSA. States could include SEL surveys as part of their schoolwide success indicators, and school leaders can promote SEL as a potential way to improve the absenteeism and suspension rates that ESSA requires them to report. School leaders could also use funds made available by ESSA's specific sections to encourage SEL efforts. These include resources assigned for supporting academically challenged students, offering teacher training and professional development, and cultivating safe and healthy students.

In addition to promoting the use of funds to support SEL efforts, arts educators should advise administrators and other stakeholders about how their work supports SEL and consider incorporating more content-specific SEL activities into their classrooms. However, arts educators should also consider the possibility of unforeseen effects, such as ESSA funding for broad SEL efforts dislodging funds for arts education, as noted in a study conducted by Richerme (2021).

1.3 The Role of National Education Philosophy (NEP)

The National Education Philosophy (NEP) emphasizes the growth of well-balanced and integrated individuals who have a strong belief in and devotion to God, forming the foundation for Malaysia's concept of holistic education. The Western concepts of holism and integrated education are discussed from the perspectives of aim, philosophical principles underpinning the practices, curriculum, and the teaching and learning process to address the significance of the holistic notion in art education in the Malaysian context. Most importantly, children with strong Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) abilities perform better academically than their peers, are in better physical condition, and have a higher quality of life. Beginning with some of the most important aspects of postmodernist holistic education, particularly as they pertain to a transformative approach to teaching art, the writers discuss holistic perspectives for the future of visual arts education. The Ministry of Education (MOE) and Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) of Malaysia can utilize a framework for improving art instruction as a reference when examining art education policy. A framework is created for art instruction with the aim of promoting social and emotional learning in children. One of the guiding principles in art education, aesthetics, can be used to combine soft skills, including self-awareness, self management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. This idea places emphasis on teaching children to appreciate and perceive through the production of studio art for a complete aesthetic experience (Subramaniam et al., 2022).

The investigation began by seeking scholarly articles via electronic databases that are relevant to social emotional learning. There were several basic steps involved in conducting the literature review, including designing, conducting, analyzing, and writing up the review. This process was developed by applying the systematic review and synthesizing and being influenced by various standards and guidelines suggested for literature reviews (Liberati et al., 2009; Tranfield et al., 2003; Wong et al., 2013; Snyder, 2019). Table 1 shows the important questions that were considered in each step of the review.

Table 1. Important Questions Considered in Each Step of the Review

The current review demonstrates the importance of social-emotional learning in the arts. It also reveals many questions pertaining to the relationship between students' social and emotional development and the arts. Arts education and social-emotional development are being neglected in many schools these days. Despite their importance, soft skills and traits related to social and emotional learning are often undervalued and neglected in comparison to subjects such as math, science, or technology. However, as students face the constantly evolving nature of the 21st century, the reviewed literature suggests that creativity, creative inquiry, and emotional intelligence are now more essential than ever (Dickenson, 2017).

In the arts education classroom, teachers can use Howard Gardner's five attitudes to support their students' social and emotional wellbeing. The five frames of thinking are the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, and the ethical mind. These five minds are highly valued in the current world and will be even more so in the future.

For the disciplined mind, students develop perseverance and self-motivation by practicing skills. In the art studio, students may practice techniques for their future projects. In the synthesizing mind, students learn how to process information and make sense of it. They learn to observe a work of art and understand the elements and principles used in it. The creating mind teaches students how to be resourceful and generate new ideas. In the art studio, students develop their creative minds by imagining ideas for artwork and experimenting with new methods and materials. In the respectful mind, students learn how to trust others and refrain from passing judgment on them. When students appreciate the artistic choices of their peers and reach agreements when working on group projects, they demonstrate a respectful mind. The ethical mind teaches students how their actions affect other people. When students learn that time is precious and valuable and that if one student diverts the attention of the class as a whole, then that time is lost for everyone which is an example of the ethical mind in action (Gardner, 2008).

The arts education subject is essential for many reasons and must be an integral part of any school curriculum because it allows students to achieve personal success. It enables students to express themselves by exploring their thoughts in an art room after struggling throughout the day with their regular studies. Arts education helps students develop their motor skills, language skills, social skills, decision-making, risk-taking, and inventiveness (Dickenson, 2017). It also enables students to imagine and find solutions to problems, collaborate, develop creativity, and cultivate the "Studio Habits of Mind." Previous studies have shown that students who engage in the arts throughout their K–12 schooling become more well - rounded individuals and perform better academically than those who have no exposure to the arts (Catterall et al., 2012; Dickenson, 2017).

Art educators should embrace the multiple social learning opportunities that their field offers students. The integration of all the "Studio Habits of Mind" into the arts education curriculum can have various advantages for students' wellbeing, including the development of craft, understanding art worlds, engaging and persisting, envisioning, expressing, observing, and reflecting (Hetland, 2013). The "Studio Habits of Mind" can enhance students' emotional intelligence while also building their confidence in their skills when art educators teach in a child-centered manner, with students acting as the artists. "Many feel that education would be vastly improved if greater attention were given to this fundamental human need to interpret and express individual and shared experiences" (New, 2007).

Arts education provides various ways for students to understand, problem-solve, and learn (Karkou & Glasman, 2004; Dickenson, 2017). It is critical for students to know that they can develop ideas by providing various solutions to problems. This can be liberating, boosting their confidence and allowing them to work independently. Recognizing that educators should teach visual arts in addition to the courses needed for standardized testing will help the educational system. A student's learning can be taught and assessed in various ways. The increased emphasis on standardized testing may have shifted the emphasis in schools toward drill exercises and rote learning, away from critical and creative thinking (Kim, 2011). That is not to suggest that math and reading are not important. However, neglecting arts education in favor of greater emphasis on math, science, or English can affect other crucial learning opportunities that allow students to develop their personal identities. According to Bates (2000), art-making is an integral aspect of human existence. By restricting programs such as arts education, students' opportunities to develop their imagination are certainly taken away (Dickenson, 2017; Kim, 2011). Arts education prepares students for life and can add impact to their lives. Art is an expression of the authentic self, one's own culture, a global perspective, and life in general (Bates, 2000). A child's education should provide opportunities to develop their whole selves and allow them to be creative and expressive (New, 2007). Apart from the "Studio Habits of Mind," other curricula that can enhance students' socialemotional learning are Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) and Understanding by Design (UBD).

The research literature on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) through arts education highlights the numerous benefits it offers students. By using Howard Gardner's five attitudes and "Studio Habits of Mind," teachers can provide students with opportunities to develop their social and emotional wellbeing. Arts education allows students to express themselves, develop motor skills, language skills, decision-making skills, take risks, and be inventive. Moreover, studies have shown that students who engage in art throughout their K–12 schooling become more wellrounded individuals and perform better academically. However, the increased emphasis on standardized testing may have shifted the emphasis in schools towards drill exercises and rote learning and away from critical and creative thinking. It is crucial to recognize that teaching visual arts in addition to the courses needed for standardizing testing will help the educational system. In this sense, educators should embrace the multiple social learning possibilities that arts education offers students. Arts education plays a vital role in preparing students for life, developing their whole selves, and allowing them to be creative and expressive.

Students who receive arts education in school are more likely to be engaged in school programs. Education administrators and policymakers need to pay attention to students' social and emotional learning because findings from the literature review suggest that providing arts education as a core component of a well-rounded education is one strategy for generating social capital and providing a strong school environment. The body of evidence derived from the review of literature is intended to guide decisions made by school districts and state policymakers and administrators, who frequently face difficult decisions with limited resources. It also provides a much-needed foundation for future arts education research and generates new hypotheses for the field. Arts education provides a solid foundation for building theory, designing interventions, and guiding future evaluations after exploring the association between variations in arts education and experiences relative to critical educational outcomes in everyday school settings.