Social Service Collaborations
As the applied arts continue to evolve as academic discipline, teaching artists are finding new and exciting ways to address the educational, emotional, and creative needs of varied groups, such as veterans, trauma victims, and children with autism. Our program in the area of child abuse prevention, Welcome to Our Family, is an excellent example of the applied arts in action.
Welcome to Our Family
The Welcome to Our Family program, developed in close partnership with the Lehigh County Pennsylvania Office of Children and Youth, addressed the area of child abuse prevention through the use of the applied arts largely in elementary schools. Working in puppetry, visual arts and script-writing, our students created some two hundred full assembly programs over a five year period. During the third year of our work in the Allentown schools, the company added a high school component to the predominantly elementary school program called Super Parents! The Welcome to our Family program featured a classroom exercise, The Circle of Safety, which was designed to make children aware of the many people who were committed to their health and protection.
An Artist/Social Worker Partnership
The Welcome to our Family program, was first and foremost a partnership between a children’s theater company and a licensed social worker. The blend of the arts and professional therapeutics is the key to making these kinds of community arts projects valid and effective. All of the hundreds of classes taught for this program employed team teaching and collaborative planning.
Goals and Outcomes
Pursuing artistic goals in the social services requires extensive planning, constant reviews and solid evaluation methods. These were all measures we were immersed in during our five years in the Allentown schools. But, for us and our students, the most important outcome happened in the classroom in small student successes and during the puppetry assembly programs given to for families, staff and the community. It was in these culminating programs that our students said so many unforgettable things.