Community Engagement: Trauma-sensitive Pedagogy & Practice

Image, Body & Voice: Supporting Girls’ Wellbeing.

Funded-research (2016-2019) by Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies. Attentive to current mental health

realities and the emergent need to provide intercultural mental health perspectives, resources,

and methods for school contexts, a participatory poetic inquiry with youth in an urban

elementary school was conducted. It was guided by the research question: In what ways might girls’ experiences with art-integrated activities and body-centred methods inform educators about pedagogical

practice and mental health interventions?

Art Therapy: Creative Expression Through Drawing upon Life Experiences &

Imagination. 

This workshop focuses on building connections (to self and others) by linking the body, heart, and mind. Focusing on cues, as well as

embodying attentive ways of being ourselves, activities will be shared that can be put into

practice in our classrooms.

Altaring & Being Altered: Natural Forms for Grounding.

Within this workshop we were invited to notice how

our bodies feel as we make hearths around candlelight using ancestral art making: finding,

altering, arranging, and making. Being found by the elements—wind, fire, water, earth—will

remind us that we, too, are nature.

Attending to Trans-generational Trauma in the 

High School ELA Classroom. 

The presentation features an assignment that invites students to voice familial/cultural complexes, often constellated around collective traumatic experiences, deeply

intertwined with personal traumas and complexes. It explores how teachers may attend to

trans-generational trauma through resonant pastiched poetry that celebrates teachers’ and

students’ "inner landscapes.”

Supporting Students’ 

Self-Awareness Through “Felt Sense” & Mandalas.

Through playing with metaphors and focusing on the “felt sense” in the body, we will

experiment with activities that promote self-awareness of personal strengths and challenges. I

will share examples of my high school students’ creative and reflective responses to similar

experiences.

Grounding Activity: Transgenerational Trauma/Inherited Family Trauma Activity

All content describing this day-long workshop has been taken from the workshop agenda.