Interrupting Trauma with Hope, Kindness, Art and Healing

The Swing of the Pendulum: The Urgency of Arts Education for Healing, Learning, and Wholeness, 2017

Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness. Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University

Current educational policies, particularly in the United States, have swung so far in the direction of overtly politicized and decontextualized testing, that we are losing opportunities to support the imaginative and expressive capacities of a generation of children and adolescents with implications for our individual and collective health. Enter arts education and the healing arts as urgently needed remedies for this imbalance, to swing the pendulum of educational practices back to a place of balance and wholeness.Informed by an arts-based sensibility, this book explores how imaginative, creative, and artistic experiences can heal, and why we urgently need them at the heart of our educational discourses and practices. These chapters invite teachers, teacher educators, and therapeutic professionals to reclaim imaginative, arts-based experiences as central to the human conditions that they serve. The narratives and case studies included here are of interest for any arts-based qualitative research course as an example of narrative inquiry, and in arts and general education programs for their pedagogical implications. “As Blake invited us to find the world in a grain of sand and showed us how poetry could materialize this, so too these storytellers discover and shape their personal meanings in ceramic pots, paintings, poems, drama, and poetry. While the stories told here are deeply ingrained interior journeys, all reflect ways of observing and embracing the world of others, of becoming wise, becoming self, and becoming skilled practitioners of meaning making. By naming and framing they suggest that clarity becomes possible and personal freedom achieved.” – Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia (from the Foreword) “This anthology offers a substantial number of narratives that represent seeking wholeness, sustenance, and renewal. In many cases, the authors provide a tribute to those who have impacted their lives in profound ways. This is an important contribution to both art education and literary education in the world of scholarly research.” – Laurel H. Campbell, Purdue University

2015

The research study focused on the influence and impact of art education on at-risk students who have experienced or are experiencing trauma. Through support of literature, including scholarly journals and case studies, and classroom observations of the researcher’s students from an inner city school in southeast Washington, D.C., it was concluded that not only does art impact at-risk students education, but it does so, positively. The classroom observations included five principal participants in both elementary and middle school, three boys and two girls, whom all live in a housing project near their school. Information was gathered about these students through both researcher observations and personal communications with the school psychologist. In combination with the student participants, data was gathered from literature —mainly from the works of Eleanor D. Brown who has done extensive research on the effects of the arts on at-risk students who have experienced trauma and/or ch...

Critical Articulations of Hope at the Margins of Art Education (Routledge), 2018

Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (jespar), 2003

Research tells us that children are more susceptible to temptations between the hours of 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.-the hours following the end of the school day when parents are not yet home from work. This study looks at the "life histories" of child participants in the Artists in the Making (AIM) program-a program that aims to motivate inner-city youth through the use of visual arts classes. Despite the diversity of the children who participated in the AIM program, several common themes emerged from the interview process: selfdiscovery, problem-solving skills, opportunities for positive risk taking, and the mastery of artistic skills. This article proposes that community-based visual arts programs can help children develop protective factors that will allow them to be resilient.

The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 2021

I reflect on the decade I spent as an art teacher in a Chicago high school where so-called "behavioral issues" are rampant, as well on my experience working with incarcerated adults, in order to explain the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline with the aid of recent research on discipline and policing. I go on to talk about a September 2019 thread in an art teacher group on Facebook. On this thread, predominantly white teachers overwhelmingly called for a teacher who was hit while breaking up a fight to press charges against the student who struck him, purportedly for the students' own good. I examine all of these experiences in light of America's history of racial repression and control, and throughout the essay I reflect on the important role played by teachers' feelings in determining the material fates of students and their families

2013

Studies in Art Education, 2015

2020

This year long project was designed to provide children in the foster care and juvenile justice systems with a way to express themselves through art created under the constraints of institutional boundaries. Youth in a Central Texas residential treatment center (RTC) were provided with opportunities and materials to express themselves through their own artistic creations; paintings, sculpture, performance, while engaging with local community arts spaces and adults that served as teachers, but were not formally trained as teachers. These “teachers” consisted of a combination of RTC staff, RTC volunteers, and local artists. Due to institutional constraints, I was unable to interview and research the youth directly. Access to the youth was only available through these teachers and the RTC administrators. Using an autoethnographic research methodology, I conducted open-ended interviews, made observations, and detailed personal reflections of the implementation of an arts-informed, commu...

Journal of Transformative Education, 2024

Written in narrative format and guided by concepts and methods borrowed from intuitive inquiry, a transpersonal and holistic approach to scholarship, the article offers insights into the research process of art teachers who were completing their graduate studies in art education during the pandemic year of 2020–2021. By engaging in an arts-based inquiry that brought them to explore aspects of their inner life, also shedding light on our shared cultural and social conditions, the student-scholars demonstrated the transformative potential of creative investigations as a vehicle for self-knowledge and healing. The article points to the importance of connecting artistic endeavor with transformative learning as both reach beyond cognitive responses to knowledge. Our findings support the vision that self-discovery processes lead to integration and social awareness which informs teaching.