What is the background and significance of our Social Emotional Arts Toolkit (SEA-T) Training?
Read on or view our Director, Ping Ho’s 15-minute presentation for a California for the Arts Panel on “Exploring Workforce Development for Arts & Health Initiatives” on September 4, 2024.
The Social Emotional Arts (SEA) Toolkit training will give you immediate tools for use in any community setting—health care, mental health, education, recreation. The core of the curriculum includes general guidelines on social emotional arts practices, communication techniques for creating rapport and preventing resistance, and strategies for managing stress responses. This is followed by four modules—art, movement, music, and writing.
The Toolkit offers a menu of creative activities intended to meet the following goals:
The comprehensive and scripted Toolkit manual offers sustainable delivery in any setting, including places with limited resources. The activities are adaptable and include instructions for different lengths of time for delivery, different age groups and abilities, and individual vs. group work. They also include ways for enriching the experience by integrating other art forms.
The curriculum was designed by a team of leading 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.
Background & Outcomes
This program grew out of a collaboration with the UCLA Brain Tumor Program and first- and second-year medical students at UCLA. We arranged for the students to serve brain tumor patients and, once the nurses on the neurology floor witnessed the results, they asked the students to see all the patients on the floor, including stroke and traumatic brain injury patients.
Ordinarily, medical students do not begin seeing patients until their third and fourth year. These first and second-year students reported that this opportunity gave them a unique perspective from the point of view of the patient. It humanized the patient experience.
We trained these students annually over a six-year period, during which time they invited participation from UCLA undergraduates and expanded services to other locations such as the UCLA Mobile Clinic and the gerontology clinic, until the pandemic brought everything to a halt.
For quality control, the students completed a comprehensive facilitator feedback survey after seeing any patient, family members, or friends. We gathered nearly two years’ worth of weekly data on their perceptions of the benefits. Data collected from the patients, corroborated by the student facilitators, suggested that participation in creative arts activities were perceived as enjoyable and beneficial to mood, anxiety, pain and discomfort, self-expression, and interest in further participation.
We have also trained teachers, for example in Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, and mental health professionals, for example with the Child and Family Development Center of Providence St. John’s Health Center and with the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health – Older Adult Services.