Responding to our Community
VISIBILITY IN MY COMMUNITY
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Facilitated by: Jessica Sharpenstein
Building Community
To create community, we started with mindfulness practices to build focus. Then, we used play, imagination, and kinesthetic creation to make tableau and moving pictures of a variety of family portrait scenarios.
Art-Based Community Building
NAME SURNAME
Building Community
Continuing the practices of relationship-building and scaffolding for community themes, these young people responded to the prompt, “What does community look like?”
What does being in community look like?
NAME SURNAME
Building Community
NAME SURNAME
“Art and creativity play an essential role in connections between the body, emotions, and the mind. Moreover, as we live in relationship to the rest of the world around us, our learning is embodied, our brain, emotions, and physiology are constantly connected.“
Van de Water, M. (2021). Drama in education: why drama is necessary. In SHS Web of Conferences (Vol. 98, p. 02009). EDP Sciences.
Building Community
The responses to the embodies prompt were ideas such as food access, sports, animal/pet care, peace, support, friendship, and fun.
What does being in community look like?
NAME SURNAME
Building Trust in Community
To continue building community, we started with mindfulness practices to build focus. Then, we moved to drawing to build trust, find humor, and build self-efficacy in the visual arts. We drew silly faces, based on an exercise by Lynda Barry, to create faces and stories of people that we might see in our community.
Silly Faces
NAME SURNAME
Building Trust in Community
Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your brain on art: how the arts transform us (First edition.). Random House.
“At a neurochemical level, the act of drawing has been shown to release serotonin and endorphins that foster a more generous, open frame of mind.”
NAME SURNAME
Building Trust in Community
The faces exercise was also used as a self-regulation tool for settling the nervous system, while building community.
Silly Faces
NAME SURNAME
Building Trust in Community
“Art pulls a community together... Art makes you feel differently.”
Lister Sinclair
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Sounds to Soothe Community
These young people have endured tremendous hardship and their nervous systems craved regulation. They spent time drawing visualizations and emotions based on live music being played on the piano.
NAME SURNAME
Sounds to Soothe Community
“Listening to music can positively affect mental health because it increases the amount of dopamine in the brain, thus helping to overcome stress.”
"Váradi, J. (2022). A Review of the Literature on the Relationship of Music Education to the Development of Socio-Emotional Learning. SAGE Open, 12(1).
NAME SURNAME
Sharing With Community
TO share with their community, a cordel was created for their family holiday party, housing these young people’s art and photos of their community.
Literatura de Cordel (Brazilian String Art & Literature)
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