Art therapists use pictorial image making to help patients communicate feelings through creative expression and cope with traumatic experiences through the artistic processes (Ulman, 2001). With children, art therapy is used as a way to discern their emotional states and determine their relationships to the external world (Edwards, 2008). However,…

A student's lack of belief in his or her own ability to do well in school can be a driving component of disengagement. In response, the author created art activities aimed to build students' confidence in their ability to learn, carry out a given art task, and identify a competence; such asset-based thinking approaches encourage students to reach…

The author's students were an unhappy, skeptical group of middle school students. Many of them had emotional issues. Many had drug addiction and prostitution in their broken and poverty-ridden families. Her school, which is a small charter school in a remote Arizona town, was a place of last resort for these students, who probably would not…