Day 100 – Celebrations!!

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

Day 100 – Celebrations!!

 

It’s my last day of sabbatical and I am proud of the work I did!  I kept track of this blog for 100 days – I didn’t write every day, but I did keep up with the process!  I wrote about the things that were capturing my attention and imagination. I tried to think through difficult concepts and not step away from complication or hard-to-convey ideas.  One of my main goals was to make my research practice transparent – and I feel I did just that! This is how I work. If you were to read every post in this blog over the past 100 days, you’d have an up-close picture of my method and process

 

I spent the day thinking about the Supervision course I plan to teach in the Summer/fall/spring.  It’s a year-long course that accompanies students in their 2^nd field placement. For many students, this happens in their third year of the program.  I usually teach the first-year courses, and the first placement Supervision course, so this will be different for me!!

 

I’m excited about returning to teaching – Orientation to expressive therapies, Principles and practices of expressive arts therapy, Theories in expressive arts therapy, and the Supervision course will be the first courses I return to this summer and fall.  I am also hoping to teach an Expressive Therapies and Social Action elective course in Spring.

 

Supervision is a course I particularly like to teach because it is practical and because it is is where theory meets practice!  I love clinical work, and I’m always so inspired by the work that students do in their internship placements.  Their work gives me confidence in the future of our field!

 

I wish we had good texts about methodology or practice in expressive arts therapy – I’ve been thinking a lot about what reading might be helpful.  I believe the previous class used the Baird (2019) text – it’s a solid text, but what is missing in terms of integrating counseling  and arts therapy?

 

Baird, B. N. (2019) The Internship, Practicum, and Field Placement Handbook (8^th ed). Pearson Education, Inc.

 

I am hoping to ask students to read my commentary – and a few other articles from the new issue of Arts in Psychotherapy. What do they care about? What does an “ethics of care” mean to them – and how do they imagine it playing out in their upcoming internships?  What role will intersectionality play in their internships?  What role does it play in their lives now?

 

Lastly, I found two articles that sort of excited me that could be included in the reading list:

 

Mayor, C., & Pollack, S. (2022). Creative writing and decolonizing intersectional feminist critical reflexivity: Challenging neoliberal, gendered, White, colonial practice norms in the Covid-19 pandemic. Affilia: Journal of Women & Social Work, 37(3), 382–395.

 

Conroy, J., & Perryman, K. (2022). Treating trauma with child-centered play therapy through the SECURE lens of polyvagal theory. International Journal of Play Therapy, 31(3), 143–152.

 

They both seem like they have something practical to offer – the first, defines “decolonizing intersectional feminist critical reflexivity” – something I’ve been struggling to do for months!  And the other offers a practical application of polyvagal theory in the context of play therapy – a treatment with which expressive arts has a lot in common. 

 

Okay – haven’t decided what to do next.  One thought is to post once a week, and another is to try to do a bit more.  We’ll see.  Thank you to all who supported me to get to the finish line!!!!

 

Estrella, K. (2022). Commentary: Troubling care. The arts in psychotherapy, 80. In press.