Project Girl: Media Literacy & Empowerment

Several Naropa art therapy students fulfilled their 2009-2010 practicum experience or civic engagement requirement in the Community Art Studio in conjunction with the Boulder Youth Body Alliance.  Boulder Youth Body Alliance (BYBA) empowers youth to reclaim a positive body image. Through a variety of grassroots projects and activities, teens take action, reclaim their voices, and make a positive difference in their communities. BYBA peer educators and activists learn how to stop trying to change their bodies and work to change the world instead.

A variation of a national program called Project Girl was offered to middle school and high school girls in Boulder County.  Project Girl (PG) is an after-school program that combines art and media literacy into a unique educational program aimed at encouraging adolescent girls to become more critical consumers of contemporary media advertising and entertainment. The purpose of PG is to help girls become literate in all media forms—TV, internet, movies, magazines, newspapers, billboards, books, product labels, and music—so that they control the interpretation of what they see or hear rather than letting the interpretation control them.

To read all about the hard work of Naropa students and Project Girl

check out the blog: projectgirlboulder.blogspot.com 

or watch the video below created by PG practicum student Chelsea O'Neil

Photos from the Project Girl Exhibition on the Naropa campus:

iMovie as an Art Therapy Tool with Children

In the fall semester of the second year of the Naropa art therapy program, students take a child and adolescent populations course.  Through readings, discussion, practice sessions with children, experiential exercises and assignments, students focus on understanding development, art assessment, approaches to treatment and the practice of art therapy with a variety of child and adolescent populations.

Each student is paired with one child, ages ranging from 4-12, for a practicum art therapy experience.  In the Fall of 2009, Donica Snyder (pictured right) created a six session art therapy treatment plan that encouraged her child client to write his own myth, manifest his own characters and setting using art materials, and use photography and iMovie to put it all together in a stop-animation short.  Check out the amazing project that was created over the course of six sessions!  A great example of technology as a tool in the art studio.

A Chance to Give Back

Photo Credit

Through a blog I follow for creative inspiration, Mon Petit Poppet, I discovered a big-hearted sewing activity that began with another blogger, Dance for Cheese.  The directive is to sew a reversible pinafore for little girls and/or plain elastic-waist cotton shorts for little boys who live at the Dago Dala Hera Orphanage in Kenya. 

Knowing that many of the art therapy students at Naropa sew... I thought this would be a great activity to use our creative talents that will be life enhancing indeed!

The fabric shop that started this activity is located in Melbourne, Australia.  A young Melbourne woman spent time volunteering at the orphanage this past Christmas.  She was struck that the children there did not have adequate clothing and that the orphanage did not have enough funds to supply any.  Her mother works at the fabric shop and she and her co-workers began making the reversible pinafores which the orphanage had requested upon contact.  Soon customers noticed the pinafores in the back of the store and they too joined in.  Through the wonderful world of blogging... the news has spread. And now I pass it on to you.

Want to be involved? All you need to do is make a girl's reversible pinafore and/or boy's elastic-waist cotton shorts that are ready to be shipped by June 4, 2010.  They are collecting these items for children of many ages - so you can make them in the child's size of your choosing! I would be willing to gather the items made and send them off in one package.  I will also find out the address of the Melbourne blogger, who has offered to have items shipped to her so that she can drop them off a the store, and I can share that with anyone who contacts me (annicejohnson@gmail.com) to send their pinafores and/or shorts. 

- Annice Johnson, Class of 2011

Student Testimonial:Taylor

For my practicum I co-facilitated a multi-generational group of women, with classmate Chelsea O'Neil, who strove to empower themselves against the debilitating effects of mass media advertising. This unique peer-based initiative was unique in its use of art to increase positive body image, self- awareness, self-confidence, and relational bonds. Every week about seventeen women met in a community based studio setting to engage in arts-based directives, thoughtful discussion, and deconstruction of truths espoused by the media. 

While I knew that looking at magazines often left me feeling badly about myself, it wasn’t until I began co-facilitating this group that I realized I carried a degree of responsibility for allowing media content to decrease my self-esteem. Through leading this group I gained a more expansive awareness, which served to lessen the media’s impact on on my self-sense. I began to notice the subtle tricks used by advertisers to manipulate my self-doubt. I found myself browsing through magazines in check-out lines having “Aha!” moments. I wanted to tell the woman in line next to me why women are held to an impossible ideal of beauty – but of course, it makes us want to buy everything! The time to share these “Aha!” moments was in the studio. 

We laughed, cried, got angry, made art, sang, danced, posed, and made fools of ourselves. Slowly we began to reclaim the tools that would strengthen us, the very tools that the media went to great lengths to obscure – our connections to one another and more importantly, our connections to ourselves.

- Taylor Siemon, Class of 2011

To learn more about the artwork created at this practicum site and 

the experiences shared in the Naropa Community Art Studio, visit:

http://projectgirlboulder.blogspot.com