CT-2 Course Descriptions & Competencies

Course Descriptions

CT-2.1  Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts: Aesthetic Responsibility in Action – 4cp

Students will engage in praxis by exploring key intersections between the principles and practices of the Expressive Arts, aesthetic responsibility and theories of conflict transformation.  This course will expand the student’s capacities to design and integrate the Expressive Arts interventions in complex and culturally diverse contexts.  They will gain creative capacities for designing Expressive Arts frameworks relevant to social situations, while critically responding to their applications.  The course will enhance their ability to approach social and cultural complexities with sensitivity and a high skill level.  

CT-2.2  Conflict Transformation and Arts-based Approaches to Peacebuilding – 4 cp

Students will enhance their understanding of root causes of conflicts and appropriate arts-based approaches for conflict transformation, and increase their capacities to apply theory and practice in a range of cultural contexts from a wide variety of perspectives beginning with family conflict.   Students will survey various theories that are frequently applied to family based conflicts, including family systems theory, and conflict theory.  In addition, they will reflect on their own experience of growing up in a family and the ways in which their own family dynamics have created repetitive patterns and influenced responses to conflict in other situations of life.  In this way, students will explore the impacts of the interdependent relationships in families (and other emotional units) on an individual’s attitudes toward conflict, and how these attitudes govern conflict-centered behaviors on a societal level.   The triad of culture and family and conflict will be measured in discerning appropriate interventions and responses to conflict transformation in nuclear families, extended families, communities, states, and society at large.  Students will explore the opportunities available to stakeholders from various levels in society  to engage in problem solving through arts-based interventions.

CT-2.3 Community Arts: A Collective Response to Conflict and Crisis – 4cp

Students will gain an enhanced understanding of a systems approach to conflict in the midst of complex community and intercultural dynamics.  Students will focus on building essential skills and capacities to facilitate transformation within community settings. This course will engage students in reciprocal learning modalities as they explore community dynamics in challenging contexts through intermodal arts practices. Change processes in communities; and community arts as a movement will be explored from diverse cultural starting points. There will be an emphasis on student led design and facilitation of community arts with peer coaching and group oriented aesthetic responses.

CT-2.4  Project Design and Implementation in the Field: A Multi-System Approach – 4cp

Students will develop and practice a multi-system approach to working in situations of crises and conflict, and cultivate specific arts-based responses.  This course combines Expressive Arts with current theories of conflict transformation, crisis management, humanitarian intervention, and peacebuilding. Relevant ethical issues that are embedded in decisions and actions of practitioners will be explored through a series of multimodal project frameworks. Crises intervention practices will be highlighted through cultural lenses, and developed in accordance with case studies from diverse social contexts. Emphasis will be placed on accruing skillful and timely responses through an Expressive Arts approach. The focus will be on developing entry points for initiating, implementing and sustaining community driven initiatives. Students will learn practical skills that are directed towards working with the systemic imbalances that perpetuate conflict and crisis situations.

CT-2.5  Core Seminar: Supervision and Self-Care in the Field  - 5cp 

Students will be introduced to the components of arts-based supervision. They will experience various modalities for supervision relationships.  Additionally, students will survey available self-assessment tools and skills that lead to a personal practice of self-care.  As a group, the students explore how supervision and self-care frameworks can best be employed to prepare them for their internship.   The students will begin the development of a training module on “Self Care for Peace Workers”.