Service Learning through Cultural Exchange and Expressive Arts Therapy

This book highlights various service-learning experiences that incorporate creative techniques such as art making and other expressive therapy practices. Utilizing service-learning provides students, faculty, and volunteers a chance to create an ethnorelativist world view, with the understanding that human beings are contextual in relationship to their culture. The use of expressive arts therapies is highlighted as a complementary way to build relationships with those who differ from one another and to increase students’/volunteers’ cultural understanding and awareness. Chapters cover concepts such as cultural immersion, cultural exchange, transformational learning, and cultural competency in working with others. The focus of service within various cultures such as Nepal, South Africa, and the Cheyenne River Lakota Reservation in South Dakota are presented using anecdotal, narrative, and case vignettes. Ideal for art therapists and art therapy students interested in engaging and/or providing service-learning experiences for others, this book is full of anecdotes from the author’s personal experience, as well as cases that reflect cultural learning using various expressive arts techniques.