Arts & Wellness in Communities

Catalog description

Arts and Wellness in Communities is designed to introduce undergraduates to ways they can use the arts for wellness for themselves and in their communities. This course is centered around art-making for personal well-being, which is different from therapy with a trained clinician. Art experiences, class discussions, examples of art in community and the study of practical ways to bring art-making into students' own lives and future professions will be utilized to explore the relationship between art and healing. Students will relate material learned in class to their future careers and/or goals by proposing a mock art project that will address the needs of a community. The intellectual frameworks and methodologies of art therapy and other creative arts therapies will be explicitly outlined and drawn upon within the course lessons. Drawing upon the curricular materials of both AA 120N and AA 130N (though not prerequisite courses), assignments for each lesson will include reading, written discussion, and visual responses about art-making in communities and for personal wellness. Weekly discussions include prompts to stimulate integrative thinking. Students will respond to the prompts with written or oral responses as well as visual reflective journaling. This course will not train students to facilitate art therapy or any other creative arts therapies as professional clinicians but will instead dive into ways we can use art for healing on our own and in our communities and workplaces.