Photovoice techniques and art therapy approaches with refugee and immigrant adolescents.

This paper describes a program informed by art therapy and Photovoice approaches and techniques aimed at helping new immigrant and refugee teens to navigate personal and cultural identities by reflecting on their experiences as new residents in the US. Photovoice is a photography and social action method that encourages participants to photograph aspects of their daily lives, reflect on their meaning and significance and galvanize necessary changes. The program began in February 2020 at the Arab-American National Museum (AANM), but was adapted for an online format and re-framed towards a reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic. Broad questions teens explored included: What is good? What is challenging? What is sustaining during challenging times? What needs to change? and What about your culture and background are you proud of and wish to share with other US residents? Highlights of the sessions demonstrate how art therapy interventions paralleled photography-assigned themes of self, home, and community and encouraged group interaction and mutual support. A virtual museum exhibition culminated the program and reached community leaders. Self-reports from select participants highlight changes in posttraumatic stress, anxiety, and somatic symptoms over the course of programming.

Art Therapy, Community Building, Activism, and Outcomes.

This article is a descriptive study of two groups who came together through service-learning: The first group is graduate art therapy students enrolled in a research class, who partnered with six community agencies to help them prepare assignments for undergraduate service-learning students in a subsequent semester. The art therapy research students also assisted the agencies with program evaluation. The second group is the six directors of the community agencies who were preparing for service-learning students enrolled in an art history class titled Art as A Social Practice. Service-learning is an experiential pedagogy where community service is integrated into an academic course, and where the services performed meet genuine community needs. The hyphen in service-learning represents the ideal that both the students and community agencies experience benefits from the relationship, although in reality, it is often the experiences of the students rather than the agencies that receive greater attention in the scholarly research literature. The present article places focus on the community agencies that, in the process of planning for service-learners, made two unexpected requests: First they requested that the service-learners stay longer than one semester, and secondly, they requested assistance with evaluating the effectiveness of their programs. This article is about the efforts to respond to these requests through the assistance of art therapy research students. With growing trends in community-based art therapy practice, greater attention to the community agencies where art therapists work is necessary and valuable to art therapy preparation. The present article describes six distinctive communities, illustrating new frontiers of practice. The research students' experiences and the experiences of the community partners were assessed using qualitative methods that included pre and post-questionnaires, written reflections of students, interviews of agency directors and agency, student, and researcher focus group transcripts. This study will inform other art therapy programs who may want to use a service-learning approach to teaching research. A discussion of the promising practices of service-learning and research, as well as the challenges leads to recommendations for art therapy education.

The relationship between spiritual resources and life attitudes of African American homeless women.

Little is known about the relationships between spiritual resources and life attitudes of homeless African American women. Spiritual resources may serve as protective factors for women leaving homelessness. This descriptive study examines spiritual resources, life attitudes, and selected demographics of 160 African American women who were homeless in the Midwestern United States. Participants ranged in age from 30-62 years of age and reported being homeless 1-9 times, with a mean of 1.94 (SD = 1.53) times. The authors draw inferences for how spiritual resources and life attitudes can influence women's efforts to leave homelessness and identify implications for nursing practice.

Homelessness among older african-american women: interpreting a serious social issue through the arts in community-based participatory action research.

This article describes the incorporation of the arts into a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) project formulated to develop and test practices for helping homeless older African-American women. Studying how older African-American women become homeless has evolved into developing and testing promising interventions by the Leaving Homelessness Intervention Research Project (LHIRP). The women's participation in creative group activities helped them to communicate their experience with homelessness, express their concerns, develop personal strengths, and obtained mutual understanding. The use of multiple art forms has revealed a number of creative strengths among the participants, which have in turn inspired innovative artistic strategies and methodologies as part of the multiple methods that LHIRP incorporates. These interventions have been useful in helping participants resolve their homelessness. The role and benefit of the arts in CBPAR is described to show how creative activities help researchers and the public to better understand the complexities of homelessness.