Expressive Arts Therapy
About
History of the Expressive Arts Therapy Program
The Expressive Arts Therapy program began offering intermodal arts-based trainings in 2010 and joined the Vancouver Arts Therapy Institute in 2023.
The Expressive Arts Therapy program and its graduates represent the field of Expressive Arts Therapy locally and internationally.
Our early faculty members had trained together, and their shared explorations laid the groundwork for group learning and group creative practices that remain at the core of the program. As faculty developed their learning in areas such as contemplative photography, somatics, movement, improvisation, social justice, community arts and arts-based research, these practices expanded the work and the program.
We continue to contribute to the evolvement of the program and the field as we further extend our practice of engaging therapy through the arts into a better understanding of decolonizing practices, cultural care, and respectful engagement of outdoor environments in our work. We look toward creating opportunities for faculty and graduates to continue to develop and shape expressive arts in praxis, research and writings.
Training Philosophy
At the Expressive Arts program we are interested in creating a collaborative learning community.
We seek to discover new and creative ways to shape and engage our learning in the field of expressive arts therapy and are committed to teaching and learning through the experiential, theoretical and practical application of our work. There is a value placed on flexibility, non-traditional and traditional methods of education, active and reflective models of learning, and self-directed learning.
We expect that students have as much to offer in the learning process as they receive from it. Students are encouraged to develop learning goals that fit their life experiences and empower self-agency.
The Expressive Arts Therapy program and the people who make up the expressive arts community are supported and inspired by an intermodal arts-based theory. We continue to explore the influences and the application of our work in the multiple domains of arts-based theory, aesthetic theory, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, social change and ecology. Our explorations include an examination of our relationship to land, place, the arts and perspectives of knowing. Ours is an inclusive and interdisciplinary perspective, which places the arts and poiesis at its center. We view poiesis (the action to make) as a verb or a process that shapes, transforms, and continues the world. We aim to create, explore, and refine new and better ways of working congruently with these central ideas.