Use our “Scribble Your Feelings” lesson
Learn how to use art to access your emotions, and how to use your emotions to create meaningful art.
The emotional well-being of students is of utmost concern to the Where Art Lives program.
Through our residencies, we want students to feel safe and free to fully express themselves. We’ve realized that this isn’t always possible. Often, we don’t have enough time develop a relationship with the classes we visit. Instead, we have decided to prioritize giving students the physical and mental tools to use art as part of their own self care and to provide resources to help our partnering teachers make their classrooms more supportive of and safe for brave expression and discussion.
Below are some sketchnotes I drew to document some of my learning about trauma informed practices and social emotional learning.
Art Can Provide
marker on paper, 8.5” x 11”, 2019
by Todd Berman
In November 2019, the Where Art Lives team joined a professional development workshop hosted by Leap Arts in Education and lead by Hannah Dworkin (who now works with SF Opera) about trauma informed teaching practices.
In “normal” times, one of every eight children has experienced trauma. That number is higher where there is poverty, and we know that it’s going to be a lot higher by the time we get through COVID. Trauma can make people particularly sensitive to stimuli so that their fight or flight instincts are easily triggered.
As teaching artists we might want to swoop in and save the students we work with, but we need to know our limitations, or we could end up causing more harm. What we can do is give kids tools they can use.
Art can provide students with a mental safe space. Time spent drawing in a sketchbook is time spent healing.
Our role is to let young people know, “You are wonderful at your core . We are here help you develop skills to express that.”
This advice very much resonated with what we were finding with our program. Each student in our program receives their own sketchbook where they are encouraged to develop their style as artists. It has been difficult to measure the impact of our arts residencies, but one piece of feedback that we heard from several partnering teachers is that many of their students continued to make art in the sketchbooks we gave them after our classes ended.
In 2017 The Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area (AEABA) hosted a professional development workshop called the “Building Blocks of Trauma-Informed Classroom Practice” featuring Carlee Adamson, an Equity Coach with Oakland Unified Public Schools.
The workshop began with a short tour of the From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art exhibit then on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. This was a survey exhibit with art created by some brilliant contemporary artists representing a wide range of ethnicities and culture heritages all exploring “Postmemory” which is defined as, “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before." You can find images, videos, and interviews with the artists on the museum’s website here.
I was Executive Director of AEABA at the time and was also working as an educator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum so I was excited to pair this gallery exhibit and workshop.
How to Calm a Triggered Turtle-Lion
marker on paper, 8” x 10”, 2017
by Todd Berman
In her workshop, Adamson talked about how trauma makes us sensitive to perceived threats (as did Dworkin). Adamson focused on how teachers can make themselves ready to avoid self-perpetuating cycles where stress behavior from one person can trigger stress behavior in another person that just compounds the stress in the room.
All of the participants filled out a long survey that put us into one of several categories. I had a combination of “turtle” and “lion” characteristics. We got into groups to talk with other people in our categories about how we tend to react when we feel triggered and how we want to be treated during those situations. Then we shared out.
We learned that while some of us might want extra attention when we are triggered, others need space and quiet to calm down. As educators, we can learn how to adjust our reactions so that we can be better at serving the students who might have struggled with trauma.
Adamson talked about going through this process with teenagers in a high school class. They noticed that “bears,” who value emotions, are rarely seen as High School teachers. They also found that “lion” behavior, being most triggered by injustice, tends to be more accepted when white males do it. When other teens exhibit this behavior, they are more likely to be punished for it and less likely to make it into “advanced” classes.
In 2020, during an online meeting convened by the SFUSD Community Partnerships office, I had the fortune of being in a breakout room with Fenicia Jacks, who does health outreach for the district. Her message to young people has been, “Name the feeling you are having. It’s OKAY.”
By helping students more completely express themselves through art, I hope that the Where Art Lives program can help them each feel better and be healthier.
Name Your Feelings
marker and pencil on paper, detail, 2020
by Todd Berman
It’s OKAY
acrylic on foam core, 3’ x 5’, 2020
Fenicia’s advice inspired me to paint this IRL background for my zoom calls.
Click on the image for a downloadable high resolution version.