Art Therapy with Special Education Students Art Therapy with Special Education Students is a practical and innovative book that details the best suitable ways to work in the field of art therapy with special education students. This book provides the reader with practical approaches, techniques, models, and methodologies in art therapy that focus on special education students, such as those with autistic spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyper- activity disorder, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and students with visual and hearing impairments. Each chapter addresses a specific population, including an overview of the literature in the field, along with descriptions of practices derived from interviews with experienced art therapists who specialize in each population. The chapters cover the therapeutic goals of each population, the specific challenges, intervention techniques, and the meaning of art. Dedicated working models that have emerged in the field and collaborative interventions involving parents and staff members, along with clinical illustrations, are also available throughout the book. Art therapists and mental health professionals in the school system will appreciate this comprehensive collection of contemporary work in the field of art therapy with special education students. Dafna Regev is an art therapist and researcher. She is an associate professor, head of the art therapy program, and member of the Emili Sagol Creative Arts Therapies Research Center at the University of Haifa, Israel. DAFNA REGEV Art Therapy with Special Education Students Cover image: Getty Image First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Dafna Regev The right of Dafna Regev to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-74282-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74281-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15691-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003156918 Typeset in Joanna MT by codeMantra Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Art Therapy for Students with Learning Disabilities (LD) and Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD/ADHD) One 1 Art Therapy for Students Who Are Deaf orHard of Hearing (D/HH) Two 22 Art Therapy for Blind Students or with a Severe Visual Impairment (B/SVI) Three 41 Art Therapy for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Four 62 Art Therapy for Students with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) Five 85 Art Therapy for Students with Behavioral Disorders Six 106 Art Therapy for Hospitalized Students Seven 125 Art Therapy for Students with Mental Disorders inSpecialized Settings Eight 147 Index 171 Preface For many years I have been intrigued by the interrelationships between art therapy and the education system. It was clear to me that there was tremendous potential for observing students as whole individuals, and that amazing work is being done by the art therapists working in this field. However, my years of work as an art therapist in the education system left me with the feeling that a variety of difficulties and burdens sometimes makes it difficult to realize this potential. My bachelor’s degree is in special education and psychology, so these two branches of special education and therapy have been ingrained in me since the beginning of my academic career. My M.A. and Ph.D. focused on art therapy, but were done in the Department of Education at the University of Haifa. I have continued to move between the two fields by coordinating a number of special education tracks. Today, I head the art therapy program at the University of Haifa, which was founded a little over a decade ago. Over the past few years, my research has increasingly focused on arts therapy in the education system. I conduct research jointly with e c Prof. Sharon Snir from Tel Hai College and in full cooperation with the a f e national supervisors of arts therapies at the Special Education Division Pr of the Israel Ministry of Education. This collaboration has led us over vii the years to explore the views and issues facing arts therapists who work in the education system. We began publishing our studies in 2015 to map out the advantages and disadvantages of integrating art therapy into the education system. We interviewed 131 people from the education system including art therapists, supervisors, educators, counselors, and principals working in the Jewish and Arab educational systems. We primarily discovered the complexity of this fabric, and how much investment is required by all involved before students and families can really be given quality art therapy that also resonates with the remainder of the time students spent in the education system (Belity et al., 2016; Keinan et al., 2016; Regev et al., 2015; Snir et al., 2017). A later study conducted completed the exploration of the clients’ perspectives when we interviewed adolescents about their perceptions of art therapy in the education system (Harpazi et al., 2020). We were thrilled to see that there are students whose prime reason for going to school is art therapy, where the art therapists are sometimes referred to as “Mom”, which shows their importance to them. Subsequently, we began to delve more deeply into the therapeutic process of art therapy in the education system. We wondered what it looked like from the art therapists’ point of view and asked them to document the course of their work, their deliberations and questions, goals, interventions, and ways of working in diary form (Adoni- Kroyanker et al., 2018). The analysis pointed to the need to think more deeply about the therapeutic approaches used by art therapists with clients in the education system, given the frequent need to work with short-term models. Other art therapists were asked to document the most helpful and hindering events in their sessions in art therapy (Shakarov et al., 2019). We found that both the therapeutic relationship between the art therapist and the client or group, and the observation of the artworks were perceived by the therapists as promoting their therapeutic work. In addition, we asked ourselves about the nature of relationships between process variables (e.g., the therapeutic alliance, client involvement in therapy, etc.) and outcome variables in these therapies (Keidar et al., 2021; Regev, 2022). The findings provided a e c a complex picture that showed that it is important to continue to delve f e Pr into this issue. viii The next step was to observe the art therapy room in the educa- tion system (Danieli et al., 2019; Dornai et al., 2019). This led to the formulation of a more grounded statement about what art therapists consider to be important in their art therapy rooms. In an exploratory study, we found that there was a correlation between the art therapists’ more positive perceptions of the location of the room, the suitability of its equipment, the art materials and furnishings, and improvement in outcome measures. By probing their working conditions, we also examined the relationship with their job satisfaction and burnout (Elkayam et al., 2020). The findings pointed to the importance of teamwork and the extent to which it is related to satisfaction in art therapists. In addition, we found that the more they were satisfied with the working conditions in the art therapy room assigned to them in the education system, the less they reported exhaustion. In recent years, we have examined much more specific issues often voiced by art therapists working in the education system. For example, we investigated parent–child art psychotherapy in the education system, which has begun to develop in response to the acknowledgment of the value of working in parallel with students’ parents (Tamir & Regev, 2020). We also responded to calls from national supervisors in the special education division of the education system to examine issues related to maternity leave, how to deal with suspended treatment, and the national obligation to fill these hours (Raubach Kaspi et al., 2022). In 2021, we published a book on arts therapies in the education system. This volume, which was also published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis), represents the voice of arts therapists who have worked for years in the education system and have found creative ways of adapting their work to the system (Regev & Snir, 2021). Interacting with these arts therapists revealed the importance of the dissemination of knowledge in the field. It underscored that our job as researchers is primarily to gather data and to give this information meaning and con- ceptualization. Working on this book was not easy, but it moved me on a personal level and made it clear that contact in the field is extremely valuable. I emerged with a need to understand the ways in which art therapists work with a variety of special education populations. Two events in my life contributed to the writing of this volume. The first is e that I went on sabbatical and writing is something I really enjoy doing. c a f The second impetus derived from my teaching an “Art Therapy with re P Children and Youth” course, in which I sometimes felt that my know- x i ledge of these specific populations needed to be updated, and that the best source of this information could come from the art therapists who work with these students in the education system on a daily basis. When I first planned the book, I did not imagine what the year would look like. It was the year of COVID, and I found myself in my art therapy room reading about working with students in the edu- cation system and mostly interviewing dozens of art therapists who were struggling to give these students the best therapy possible in unprecedented conditions. The conversations with these art therapists took on enormous meaning but most of all emphasized how much