Art Therapy Educators Research Articles

Art for Humanizing Mental Illness When Teaching Diagnosis

Teaching a class that covers psychiatric diagnoses is essential for graduate students in mental health professions both for the purpose of providing informed therapeutic services for their clients who may have been diagnosed with a mental illness, and, increasingly, for the provision of diagnosis as a licensed clinician in the United States. Art therapy educators designed an experiential learning approach rooted in two frameworks that humanize mental illness (Two Continua Model of Mental Health and Mental Illness, Power Threat Meaning) combined with reflective art viewing and making. A cumulative art assignment based on one-canvas painting fosters students’ critical perspectives through four observed patterns: appreciating impact of layering; understanding mental illness through art materials and processes; empathizing through reflecting on one’s own experiences; and recognizing the wholeness of those living with mental illness. The incorporation of response art in the psychopathology class has had the intended dual impact of instilling a humanizing approach to mental illness and fostering self-reflection.

What are You All Going to Do to Keep Black Women in Art Therapy?

In this viewpoint, the authors describe their impressions of a 2018 conference and the significance of participating in a learning environment that centered on arts therapists of color. Collectively, two art therapy educators, a music therapy educator, one new professional art therapist, and one art therapy graduate student, question the maintenance of professional norms that have at times motivated BIPOC students and practitioners to leave the creative arts therapies in search of other professional places to thrive. The article concludes with a Womanist Manifesto for Arts Therapies Education.

Risk, rupture and change: Exploring the liminal space of the Open Studio in art therapy education

This article details an ongoing inquiry into the nature of the three-way conversation in art therapy education, regarding the relationship between art, educator and student. Drawing upon a reflection on the use of the Open Studio setting as a third space in the educative environment, we explore the impact of our role as educators when students are processing their learning experiences with art. A practice-led exploration of these questions illuminates the importance of expanding the learning interaction to incorporate experiences that include the risk associated with rupture, innovation and change. Set within the framework of an emerging conversation between two colleagues, this paper is offered as a contribution to the ongoing discussion about the unique questions of pedagogy that art therapy educators grapple with when working with students who take up the opportunity to explore emergent aspects of the therapist identity.

A Little Less Alone: Surviving Sanism in Art Therapy

Sanism is the systematic oppression of people who have experiences often labeled as mental illness. The author, a psychiatrically disabled, queer art therapist, describes her direct experiences of stigma and sanism as a past art therapy student and current art therapy educator. The framework of disability justice, a creative and intersectional response to ableism and sanism, resists pathologizing, medical model approaches to disability and engages art as a means of change-making. Art therapy educators can use a disability justice framework to challenge sanism in the classroom and embrace anti-oppressive pedagogy as a means of dismantling oppressive cultural norms in art therapy.

Building a Bridge Between the Deaf Community and Art Therapy

Art therapy has the unique potential to serve the mental health needs of the Deaf community. Art therapy practitioners and educators from the dominant (hearing) culture can become allies by de-centering verbal and audiological communication. The unique visual storytelling practice within Deaf culture makes art therapy a fitting modality for serving this minority group.

Signature Pedagogies for Art Therapy Education: A Delphi Study

Due to shifting standards in art therapy education and licensure an examination of how educators are preparing students for professional practice is warranted. This Delphi study used the framework of signature pedagogies to identify discipline-specific methods used by art therapy educators to teach students how to think, practice, and develop the ethics and values of the art therapy profession. A sample of 18 art therapy educators reached consensus on three common teaching methods and pedagogical worldview deemed essential to the education of art therapists: (a) experiential teaching and learning using art materials, (b) practicum/internship placements, and (c) art-based experiential learning. The results substantiate the claim that art therapy is a distinct profession with teaching methods differentiated from related disciplines.

Public Relations: Art Therapy Pedagogy Out of Bounds (Relations publiques : la pédagogie de l’art-thérapie hors limites)

Art therapy pedagogy associated with the Art Hives network at Concordia University (Montréal, Quebec) and cultural practicums at Ulster University (Belfast, Northern Ireland) share in common a movement to develop learning studios that encourage public relations—unscripted relational encounters with activists, artists, allied professionals, and social practitioners that inform art therapy practice. The curriculum is composed through collaborations, with the art therapy educator becoming the curator of an educational assemblage that is beyond the boundaries of the university itself. This is pedagogy as civic practice, where knowledge parameters of the art therapy profession are transgressed and moved, as a choreography that extends beyond boundaries of habitual learning. This article encourages art therapy educators to devise multicentered learning studios (in public places) that support personal and social concerns. In this context art therapy education is constructed as a counterpoint to academic introversion. The proposal here is to mobilize art therapy education as an activist-informed reciprocation of ideas, actions, and resources.

Art Therapy Teaching as Performance Art

This viewpoint asserts that art therapy education is a form of performance art. By designing class sessions as performance artworks, art therapy educators can help their students become more fully immersed in their studies. This view also can be extended to conceptualizing each semester—and the entire art therapy curriculum—as a complex and multilayered drama. Every subject taught in art therapy is a potential source of artistic inspiration.

Professional Identity Perceptions of Dual-Prepared Art Therapy Graduates

This article describes a qualitative study of the development of professional identity in art therapists who also prepare as counselors. Graduates from one university's two distinct master's degree programs were interviewed: (a) art therapy (n = 9) and (b) art therapy combined with counseling (n = 11). Most participants regardless of their degree described their professional identities as a combination of art therapy and counseling, and perceived professional identity in a variety of ways based on distinct contributing factors. Recommendations to support graduates negotiating complex professional identities are offered to art therapy educators and graduate students.

The emergence of Australian art therapies: Colonial legacies and hybrid practices

This article provides an overview of the emergence of art therapies in Australia, from the perspectives of two art therapy educators from the University of Western Sydney (UWS). It introduces the context of art therapy practice and education in Australia and draws together a background history to the development of the profession, including key historical figures. The paper locates current positions and horizons within a post colonial context, revealing the innovative and hybrid practices of arts therapies that have evolved and are emerging in this particular place. A series of images provides a visual, poetic counterpoint to the text. Keywords: Art therapies, Australia, colonial legacies, art therapy education; hybrid practices

Are Art Therapy Educators Overworked and Underpaid?

AbstractQuestionnaires were sent to the 22 AATA-approved graduate programs to survey the working conditions of art therapy educators. With few exceptions, the data from the 16 respondents indicate that art therapy educators' salaries are lower than national university faculty salary averages, that few are tenured, and that course loads are high. It appears that few educational institutions have made strong commitments to their art therapy graduate programs.

The Art in Art Therapy Education: Where is It?

AbstractThe meaning and placement of studio components within art therapy education programs are explored in this article. The results of a survey of art therapy educators regarding the inclusion of art studio requirements in conjunction with internship in their educational curricula and the effects of including art in educational programs are discussed. Central to the discussion is the idea of place for artmaking. Supporting the idea of place, a model studio component for interns in an AATA-approved art therapy education program is discussed with a focus on student responses to participation. The studio as a container for artmaking and art's potential to heal is examined in the context of nonsupportive educational, organizational, and practical settings.“It is art which makes life, makes interest, makes importance … and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process” (Henry James cited in Stevens, 1951, p. 169).

Art Therapy Education: A Tool for Developing Verbal Skills

The ability to make verbal interventions and use spoken language in a therapeutic manner is an essential competency for the art therapist to possess. Those responsible for the education and training of future art therapists must devote more direct attention to the development of verbal skills for our students within the art therapy curriculum. Many agencies who take our students for field-work as well as those who employ our graduates expect art therapists to counsel verbally in addition to providing art therapy services. Feedback from students as well as graduates who are now working as professionals in the field clearly indicates that this area of art therapist competency is one that needs greater attending to. In this article, the author addressed this very real need by offering a teaching-learning tool for students, supervisors, and art therapy educators.