Creativity beyond the formal curriculum: arts-based interventions in post-disaster trauma settings

ABSTRACT

Schools regularly find themselves dealing with the aftermath of family, community and national tragedies. In this article, two university-based educators share their experiences of working with schools to engage children in arts-based activities to support the processing of the traumatic events they endured. In both cases, children in local schools had been traumatised by natural disasters and needed support to enable them to make sense of what had happened and to begin to absorb these events into their own personal histories.

The article summarises the relevant literature on the importance of post-traumatic processing and the use of arts-based methods for this purpose. The two case studies, one from the 2010–2011 New Zealand earthquakes and the other from the 2009 Samoan tsunami, are described separately before common themes are drawn from both cases. The joint findings are discussed using a framework that brings arts-based interventions and post-trauma processing together. The article concludes with the lessons learned from these experiences that might have broader applicability in other pastoral care contexts.