The Certificate Program in Social Emotional Arts (SEA) will take your skills to a new level, regardless of your professional background. Why should you take this training?
Read on or view my 15-minute presentation for a California for the Arts Panel on “Exploring Workforce Development for Arts & Health Initiatives” on September 4, 2024.
The arts are innately powerful. They provide a pathway for expressing our inner world when speech is impacted by stress, ability, or culture. They calm the brain to enable learning and constructive interaction with others. They evoke a full range of positive emotions as well as reducing negative ones. They offer an organic medium for connection. And they appeal to cultures that value healing in the context of community.
However, are the arts enough as they are to lead to measurable social-emotional benefits? Yes and No.
This training will teach you how to maximize the innate power of the arts by mindful attention to the process to enable participation, for example, by those with arts scars, those who are neurodiverse or from other cultures, or those who for whom sensory experiences or imagination might trigger traumatic stress responses.
In addition, you will learn how to design lesson plans that consider the needs of the populations you intend to serve and learn how to evaluate them, in order to increase the effectiveness of your programming and strengthen stakeholder buy-in. The impact of programs may otherwise be hit or miss.
In short, we will enable you to do what you do—even better.
Our core teaching faculty and curriculum developers are largely creative arts therapists–in art, music, dance/movement, drama, and poetry–who are trained in using the arts to achieve social, emotional, cognitive, and physical goals. Their approach emphasizes process over product.
What are key elements of SEA?
- In SEA, there is no wrong way to express yourself creatively.
- We use nonjudgmental language, even avoiding positive judgments, to facilitate engagement and dialogue without encouraging external validation seeking.
- We utilize synchrony, for example, in movement or rhythm to facilitate connection because this is rewarding to the brain. We encourage validation through yes-and approaches.
- We encourage reflection and sharing on the process of creative expression and its relevance to life, because research has shown this deepens stress reduction, and this enables everyone to be seen and heard.
- We reinforce positive behavior by calling it out when we see it.
- We employ strategies for preventing and supporting difficult feelings or traumatic stress responses with sensitivity, care, and compassion.
- We support inclusionary participation by offering alternatives, with acknowledgement and humility.
- We disarm resistance and prevent power struggles through the strategic use of language to encourage problem solving and connection.
- We find creative ways to enable even the most reserved to be seen and heard.
In short, we prepare our trainees to address challenges they may face at the front lines of need. Creative arts therapists who have taken our Certificate Program training have reported to us that our practical orientation was not something they learned in graduate school.
You will also learn the symbiotic benefits of multiple art forms and expand your comfort zone with creativity. You will learn to trust your gut and discover the power of interdisciplinary teamwork. And, like many others before you, you may discover that the benefits apply as much to the personal realm as the professional realm.
Our SEA alums become members of our SEA family and are notified of special opportunities to use their skills in the community.
After many years of observation, we have found that everyone brings their gifts to the table, regardless of their age or background. It’s humbling, inspiring, and gratifying to learn from our trainees and to bear witness to their sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and creativity.
Don’t delay. You won’t regret it.
Ping Ho, MA, MPH, Founder & Director, Arts & Healing Initiative