Fostering student psychological resilience using humanitarian art pedagogy in wartime Ukraine

The ongoing war in Ukraine has brought unprecedented disruption to education, forcing schools to adapt to remote formats while preserving children’s mental health and social connection. This article presents the case of the School of Humanitarian Labour (SHL) in Kherson — a unique Ukrainian educational institution that integrates art, theatre, and media creativity into a comprehensive model of humanitarian pedagogy. Between 2023 and 2025, SHL conducted a large-scale online experiment involving 160 students (aged 10–17), including internally displaced children, students from active combat zones, and children with disabilities. Through a combination of theatre, voice acting, radio broadcasting, and creative collaboration, SHL developed a system of art-based psychosocial rehabilitation. The study conceptualizes this approach as a “humanitarian technology of resilience,” demonstrating how artistic expression reconstructs emotional balance and cognitive focus under wartime stress. Using a mixed qualitative-quantitative design —including Cronbach’s alpha (0.84) validation, teacher evaluations, and descriptive statistics —the research analyzes outcomes across emotional and social dimensions. Findings confirm that art-centered education functions as a systemic mechanism of resilience: it reconstructs continuity, empathy, and meaning within disrupted childhoods.