Art Therapy Informed Visual Arts Teacher
It’s always a pleasure to host one of my student’s articles on the website. Thank you to Catherine Parer Grimwood for sharing this essay as part of her coursework for the Art Therapy Diploma Course.
Robert Gray
Director and Senior Lecturer at CECATRegistered Art Therapist and Psychologist
MA A. Th., AThR; B. Soc. Sc. (Psych.) (Hons.), MAPS.; BA. Theol. (Hons), MA Theol.
Why consider studying art therapy as an art educator?
As a young person, I chose to pursue art as a vocation and eventually became a Visual Arts teacher. On my way to becoming a teacher, I experienced some mental health issues and was able to use painting, drawing and writing to help process, integrate, and resolve them.
The apparent link between my creating images and using art to work through emotions was evident. I had no doubt that my increase in a sense of mental health and well-being was attributed to the artmaking processes and products that I pursued. As a fledgling teacher, I delivered small workshops to people of all ages and again saw the potential of art to increase self-awareness and be a catalyst for mental health.
I value my role as a high school Visual Arts teacher and enjoy seeing students flourish and expand their insights of who they are and what their part in the world is through the arts. I agree that Art is our one true global language … It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible. (Richard Kamlar found in Magsamen et al., p. ix).
As an art teacher and facilitator, I am interested in the way people engage with media, signs, symbols, motifs, and art processes. There have been many times when I have facilitated an art workshop or class and have recognised that there was an emotional or psychological watershed moment for the person involved. It seemed to be a zone where a response from themselves or another could help, hinder or delay whatever needed to be analysed, acknowledged or resolved. I have witnessed these salient moments with grown people, school students, church folk, patients in hospitals and psychiatric institutions, and in people with a disability. It appeared to be that the state of the person was ‘energised’ in some way through the art-making process (the non-verbal process), compelling something emotional or psychological that was previously hidden or submerged to be known.
Art Therapy
When people are at the ‘end of themselves’. When they may feel ‘stuck’, have discomfort, or are depressed and talk therapy is not working, they may be referred to an art therapist. Art therapy can be used by people of all ages, from toddlers through to geriatrics. Sometimes people attend art therapy in groups or as individuals. Art therapy can be useful for people with a variety of concerns and conditions from those who are considered to be refugees to those who are bed bound from a chronic illness.
Art therapy is adaptable, allowing therapists to tailor interventions based on clients’ needs, preferences, developmental stages, cultural backgrounds, and therapeutic goals. The creative process itself is therapeutic, offering individuals a safe ‘space’ to explore, heal, and foster personal growth through personal expression.
Art Therapy Aware Teachers
Art teachers encounter many challenges in the art classrooms, and I consider an art therapy informed art teacher could have the capacity to help students and other stake holders like other teachers, counsellors, learning support staff, and family members bridge the psychological, emotional, developmental, social and cognitive gaps for students with support needs. This may help them to fill areas of dissonance, disengagement, disruption, poor impulse control, opposition, disorganisation and poor concentration whilst in the classroom. Art therapy aware teachers may help to unnerve the learner and sustain their engagement in pedagogical activities. In effect, an art therapy aware art teacher can hold space for the learner by affording them some activities and interactions that create dignity and containment for a student till they can see someone with clinical expertise.
There is also scope for art therapists to be employed in school settings to help support the already stretched wellbeing and counselling units embedded with the school system. The art therapist could be a part of the fiber of the school and be a support for students who find that talk therapies and cognitive and pedagogical agenda do not support them where their needs are.
An art therapist employed by a school could work beyond the curriculum; Whereas the art therapy informed art teacher could sit within the curriculum and use tasks and lessons to support (and model) the way forward for a student’s sense of cognitive and psychological equilibrium. An art therapist within a school will need to have a separate physical working space where students can visit, feel safe and be able to communicate non – verbally or verbally without undue consequence. (Wojakovski, 2017)
Art therapists, as opposed to art informed art teachers, could also engage and support students who are marginalised through a sense of social isolation, chronic school avoidance, anxiety, depression, lack of impulse control, being overwhelmed by learning needs, trauma complexities, complex diagnosis like ADHD and ODD, and or having psycho-physical-emotional sensitivities that are yet to be understood. Art therapy could be used as a way of helping students reintegrate back into the mainstream of school life. Students who are having medication reviews and are yet to have contact with a pediatrician could be engaged by an art therapist with positive effect too.
A 13-year-old student who appeared to respond well to having an art therapy informed art teacher, was Cameron (name has been changed to protect his privacy). Cameron is a student who was diagnosed with severe ADHD and who has a complex family history including divorce. This student was often withdrawn in class and regularly refused to take his head off the desk, let alone attempt the learning task given him. Upon beginning a mixed media unit in the Visual Arts classroom that involved students dispensing their own paint for a ‘swirly’ sky pattern, Cameron became very chatty and animated. During the painting activity Cameron engaged with his peers and began exploring the sensory quality of the paint with his hands and avoided the pedagogical request to create a more recognisable or realistic looking sky and he did not rely on paint brushes to push the paint around. In a spontaneous way, Cameron swapped the learning task in the classroom for a therapeutic and abstract sensory experience. Was this a gray area of teaching that could have been considered art as therapy? What role was the art teacher to play in this situation? As the teacher, I allowed Cameron to pursue the sensory experience of making a skyscape and subsequent landscape using his hands. Because of this decision, I believe Cameron stayed engaged and active with the task and his peers for much of the unit.
Another task, some two months on, involved Cameron and his classroom peers modeling a small clay bust of themselves. Independently, Cameron created a ceramic portrait of himself with a symbol of a goat’s head and a small open book displayed on top. He told me, “I like goats, and I love books. The book is The Hobbit”. Cameron said this in an animated way before bursting out the door to have it displayed in the library for all to see. There was no doubt that Cameron was feeling exhilarated after having created this object. Since then, Cameron has reverted to putting his head on the desk and avoiding any schoolwork. Why is he withdrawing again? Is he dissociating? As an art therapy informed teacher, I do consider that there is scope for some art in therapy at this point for this child but who can pursue this with him in the busy school schedule? I believe Cameron has clinicians outside of school that meet with him, but would not an art therapist who is made available at school (when he is withdrawing) be more suited for this student?
Through body language and facial expressions, it was obvious that Cameron enjoyed modelling the portrait of himself. It became clear that it gave him some capacity to communicate aspects of himself that verbal dialogue was not able to afford him. As Muri says,
Creating an image of the self can be a means of stepping back from an experience and reflecting on the process. An artist or client can create an image of self-acknowledge the emotions expressed in the self-portrait, and distance the self from that feeling. (2007, p333)
I think the experience of intense self-reflection and autonomy Cameron felt while making his self-portrait was a liberating one because it gave him a sense of personal agency and connectivity with his peers that perhaps he was not able to acknowledge or experience in other areas of his life.
It is worth noting for children like Cameron, that it is imperative that we seek out ways to foster personal and wholistic growth in them for their personal well-being and for the good of our community and society. As Tim Anders, the art therapist founder of the highly efficacious UK charity called Art Therapies for Children says, “If we don’t look after the emotional wellbeing of our children, what kind of future will they have?” (Wojakovski, 2017)
Despite art teachers not being clinical therapists, they are still in a position to help children cope with adversity by utilising the therapeutic properties of art education (Hunter et al., 2018; Johns et al., 2020; Kay, 2020). They can do this through building relationships, and empathetically listening and affirming students. This can all happen in tandem with referring students to clinicians or a wellbeing team for clinical counselling and health care. Consequentially, if an art therapist were to be made available to children in a school setting, the practical purpose of any art therapy experience would be for a certified therapist clinician to facilitate the use of the creative process to support personal and relationship management goals, so as to begin to resolve and heal internal and external conflicts and distress. (Heise, 2021)
Whilst it is often the case that art teachers can harness (consciously or subconsciously) the therapeutic elements of art education to provide a safe space for creative expression for students, they need to be mindful that there will always be gray areas in education where a student’s health and wellbeing is questioned. (Hannigan et al., 2019) There is a difference between therapeutic educational activities and art activities endorsed for and practiced in an art therapy context. As art teachers, the focus is always on teaching while for art therapists the focus is on diagnosis and treatment. To reiterate, art teachers may create spaces and activities that can have therapeutic benefits, but that does not correlate with them practicing art therapy.
Trent was a student of 14 who was presenting with chronic anger and intermittent physical aggression. He was learning to regulate this through weekly school counselling sessions. Trent (his name has been changed for confidentiality reasons) was a chronic school avoider however, when at school, he was often sitting outside of classrooms and wandering during class times. On one occasion, Trent was unable to contain his anger and expressed the need to separate himself from a class with peers in it that he had issue with. Given I was free, I invited him into the art room to try some drawing to calm him down. I was thinking something repetitive like colouring on a large surface and using something solid that would enable him to add pressure to a surface and therefore relax his parasympathetic nervous system. However, Trent wanted to talk, and it became apparent he had much to say even though he was unable to verbalise exactly what was bothering him. In response to this, I gave Trent some charcoal and a large (2m square) sheet of paper and some quiet space after we chatted. In our conversation, Trent had stated that his family were important to him. Trent drew over the whoa page given him. He drew about 15 members of his family including the deceased (of which there were a few). Trent also embedded some halo symbols over the images of the people who had passed, and he sketched himself with a beard like he was ‘in his twenties’, he said. Trent’s profile was in the foreground and his head was significantly larger than the other family members’ heads.
After sketching for over thirty minutes, Trent was able to tell me what he saw in his drawing, and he seemed to be more regulated and integrated after that. Trent named the people in his drawing, and spoke of their relationship to him and each other, and said he would meet the deceased again after he passed away. His body had relaxed and he was able to sit for longer periods that day. Trent went to his next class in a calm manner.
Through this spontaneous drawing experience, I believe Trent felt more composed because he had made visible something that was emotionally and socially weighty for him – that is, the trauma of the passing of many of his family members. I believe the drawing had given him a vehicle to process a part of that grief. Perhaps the drawing, as a therapeutic experience, was also able to help Trent develop a more accepting personal narrative and feel more empowered to build emotional safety as he filtered through some difficult content. If you’re interested in becoming an Art Therapist, reach out to us here today to get started!
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