Preview: CSL 597 Expressive Arts Elective Offered Spring 2010

Taught by Joan Horgan

Have you ever felt stuck when working with a client? Would you like to expand your repertoire of options in when counseling individuals or with groups? Expressive Arts and Counseling is an experiential course designed to help counseling students explore how the various forms of artistic expression – drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, drama, movement and music, can be used in group and individual counseling.

The course will focus on the inter modal use of multiple forms of art expression as a vehicle to deepening participant’s awareness of their inner experiences and creatively integrating those experiences as they move through life. Students will learn to apply what is learned through the class to the work they are being prepared to do in various settings and capacities out in the wider community (such as school, college and community mental health settings). We will also explore how the arts lend themselves to being used with various populations and issues individuals might bring to the counseling setting.

You do not have to be artistically “talented” in order to benefit from this course. The way that art is used is as a vehicle for gathering information and so the quality of any particular work or art is much less important than what it conveys to the person who created it. The use of the various art forms gives students a chance to experiment with different possibilities and comfort zones and increases our capacity to be effective with our clients.

This course will be taught over a series of four weekends meeting Friday evening from 6-9pm and Saturday from 10am-5:30pm. The weekend dates are: January 22-23rd, February 12-13th, March 19-20th, and April 9-10th. (As you might guess from this format, it is necessary to be able to attend each weekend since missing one would mean you were absent for one fourth of the course.)