NEW INITIATIVES

As the 2022-2023 school year began, AEN initiated efforts to explore the ways that artsbased trauma-informed/ healing-centered engagement can best be implemented as a whole-school model. Building upon the success of the training series, AEN is partnering with the Lincoln School, a PreK- 8th-grade school of approximately 400 students. According to state test scores, 14% of students are at least proficient in math and 28% in reading. With strong leadership, the school’s faculty has participated in numerous trainings to improve school culture and climate and to support students’ academic progress. At the first AEN introductory training sessions, participants included staff from all school departments and all aspects of the school community. Part of AEN’s work will monitor the different ways that this work manifests in school spaces other than classrooms and outside the regular school schedule.

AEN

And The Core Planning

TEAM ARE CAREFULLY CONSIDERING HOW TO BUILD UPON SUCCESSES and assessing the costs and benefits of different strategies for continuing and growing the work. Across all aspects of the work over the past six years, the planning team, the facilitators, and all participants represent a range of experience and expertise and come from a variety of backgrounds: K-12 teaching and administration, Health Care clinicians, and supervisors, therapists and social workers, arts, cultural and communitybased youth educators and service providers, as well as independent teaching artists. While most of the programs targeted Newark-based participants, thanks to Save the Music Foundation funding, the program has touched people across the state of New Jersey, Anaheim CA, and Miami FL.

Reflections: Core Planning Team and Training Facilitators

It is clear from interviews that no matter the role or professional experience, the facilitators and the core planning team were the first line of learners, and their respective practices have been mightily changed.

As a group, they recognized the prevalence of trauma, with different levels of acuteness and intergenerational impacts on their own lives and the lives of their students. As they learned from each other, exploring alignments, they created and tested the model of collaborative learning.

“There are safe ways for artists to discuss deeper discussions without triggering their audiences. I guess the best way to describe it is how does one speak kindly on scary topics? It seems like many of the people who taught the training spoke in such a way. And how can I engage more honestly and empathetically without crossing into therapy territory?

(Anonymous Participant Survey Response)

With the experiences of the last two years, including the Covid Pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, racial, social, economic, political, and environmental upheavals, and exigent demands for reckonings, it was tremendously important to provide support for this community.

�� Arts educators studied new theories and brain research that changed the ways they thought about pre-requisites and optimal conditions for teaching and learning and they incorporated new language and practices that reinforced and made more intentional the benefits of introducing arts experiences to trauma-impacted youth.

�� Clinicians and social workers paid more attention to the ways that the arts were essential to so many, and recognized the power of arts-based traumainformed approaches to health care and education in a way that better supports families. They commented, gratefully, about the arts- based exercises that contributed to their own self-care needs, and were eager to further explore the ways that arts engagement can provide a framework to mitigate the root causes and effects of trauma. For example, one healthcare practitioner plans to incorporate art and places for art-making in a new clinic; rather than simply treating symptoms or reacting to crises, this would be a wise investment in health and well-being.