ART TEACHING WITH
CHILDREN
Since spring 1998,
I have held a half-time post as art teacher at the
Stockholm City School of Culture. The school, which is
run by the municipality, provides extra-curriculum
education in the creative arts (theatre, music, dance,
art) for children and teenagers over the entire city. The
school is large, 300 teachers at present catering for the
needs of about 14,000 children. Together with five other
artists, I share the responsibility of building up the
school's new art department. My particular area of
operations stretches from Årsta to Farsta and Högdalen,
in other words a large section of the southern part of
the city. ART THERAPY WITH
ADULT REFUGEES SUFFERING FROM WAR TRAUMA
During autumn '98, in addition
to this teaching work, I have worked with traumatised
adult refugees in a project organised by Familjcentralen
BVC at Haninge, south of Stockholm (project leader: Karin
Flygare). This involved working one day a week with a
class of students studying swedish at the SFI school
(Svenska för Invandrare - Swedish for Immigrants) in
Haninge. This class was specially formed, gathering
together the most traumatised refugees in the school, and
was composed of men and women from a wide range of
countries and cultures - Peru, Bosnia, Eritrea, Bangla
Desh. Each had varied, but consistently traumatic
memories of past experiences that seriously interfered
with their studies, and indeed, with their very capacity
to live on an everyday basis. Considerable improvement
was noted in a number of cases, two of the group leaving
before the end of term to take up jobs in "the
outside world". An exhibition of the pupil's work in
Haninge Folkets Hus in december '98 completed the
project. The results are at present being evaluated, to
be summarised in a report that should be complete
sometime during the first half of 1999. See further on
this site: Art works by female child soldier.
For a full description of this project
in swedish: In january '99, together with my colleague Marius van Niekerk, I shall begin working with another group of refugees, all of whom are war veterans from different countries in the Middle East - ex regular soldiers, militiamen, guerilla fighters. These men suffer from what is known as "combat-related PTSD". Most have several years of combat experience (eg Iran/Irak war and the Gulf war). Several have in addition been imprisoned and tortured. All are severely traumatised. The idea is to make use of two methods that have previously shown themselves very effective in work with traumatised veterans (eg Vietnam veterans): on the one hand, the self-help group, and on the other, creative expression - in principle, the same methods as used with the SFI group: a combination of drawing and painting and group discussion. The difference this time is that an individual with real war and PTSD experience will be part of the team. Marius served as a paratrooper in the South African Army at the beginning of the 80's, and spent two years fighting in the bush on the border between Namibia and Angola, an experience that afterwards lead to many years struggle with PTSD. It is not easy for the veteran to speak of his war trauma to one who has not himself been a soldier, seen war at first hand, and gone through the mill of PTSD. Few psychologists in Sweden today have such experiences, a factor that tends to inhibit the therapy process when it comes to veterans. The aim of the project is to provide an ancillary
group process, complementary to the individual therapy process (each
group member also receives individual therapy with a psychologist).
Marius' role in the discussions combined with the activity of painting
itself, should enable the men in the group to more easily open up
to us and to each other, speaking of matters they hitherto may never
have discussed with anyone. The project is organised by CTD - Centre for the
Tortured and Traumatised, Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm, and involves close cooperation
between us and psychologists and psychiatrists at the Centre (project
leader: psychologist Luis Ramos-Ruggerio). Both SFI and CTD projects
are financed by grants from Socialstyrelsen (The Ministry of Social
Affairs), the purpose being to explore and evaluate the potential
of this kind of combined self-help/art therapy group work with people
who suffer from war trauma (see further on this site: THE SOLDIER & PTSD
as well as ART WORKS BY TRAUMATISED VETERANS).
In a further project in the spring I hope to work together with science teachers and children between the ages of 13 and 15 in a Stockholm school. This cooperation will involve painting a series of murals in a corridor outside the science classrooms together with the pupils. The subject of the mural will be the matter dealt with in the science curriculum (see design for phase 1 of the project: Metatron's Cube). This experimental project realises an idea I have had for some time - the development of a parallel process of teaching to that taking place in the classroom. This process would involve cultural expression of the contents of the curriculum, an activity that would take place in the corridors and other suitable common areas of the school throughout the term, under the guidance of artists, drama teachers, musicians etc. (see swedish text: Framtidens Skola). The purpose of such an approach would be to reinforce and (hopefully) reinvigorate classroom instruction by adding a parallel dimension of creative and above all visual immediacy to the pupil's exploration of the subjects under study. |
