The Alchemy of Witness: Integrative Skills for Art Therapy, Counseling, and the Helping Professions

“The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is- it’s to imagine what is possible.” -bell hooks

Health and education practitioners rely on systems of witness to engage in their work. Through witnessing others, space for learning and personal growth is fostered. Through witnessing the self, a deep and authentic creativity is cultivated. Through the combination of the two, professional practices that are generative and sustainable - even alchemical - are built. The goal of this program is to foster the well-being of future public servants of humanity through art and movement-based inquiry into the possibility of the human experience.

This program is for students interested in the helping professions, namely: art therapy, counseling, occupational, physical, and relational therapies, social work and case management, ecotherapy, and education or para-education, as well as the relational branches of psychiatry and nursing. Future outdoor/experiential educators will also find themselves at home in this curriculum.Use of the campus darkroom and Photoland will provide us with a meditative interactional space to work side by side, while working together. We will use cameras and photography to witness the world in a new way.

Our work will be distributed across two categories: skills for witnessing others (as in art therapy and counseling) and skills for witnessing ourselves (who must not be left behind but instead fully integrated into the design of the work). Within both categories, students will explore the creativity and resilience of the human psyche through weekly process-oriented painting and visual arts practice (beginners welcome), photography practice, mindfulness, gentle yoga, and other empirically supported movement practices, and an exploration of naturalism and ecotherapy on our ecologically abundant campus. If you have a mobility concern, please contact the faculty at partridp@evergreen.edu or during the academic fair with any accommodation questions about this program's movement/mindfulness-based section.

Through books and articles, films, audiobooks, podcasts, interactive witnessing workshops, analog black and white photography work, yoga/movement/mindfulness practices in the campus recreation center, and art therapy skills practice, students will build an embodied, artistic, and academic study of both historical and contemporary greats who have approached the problems of being a helper or artist practitioner. This will include learning from the voices of Carl Jung, Twyla Tharp, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Julia Cameron, bell hooks, David Whyte, Carl Rogers, and others, and will include a module on the ethics of communication.

This rigorous program will ask students to immerse themselves in regular participatory communication/conversation practices and workshop explorations in papermaking, ink, watercolor, and image-creation as tools to learn about the self, one another, and the space in between, in our dedicated arts annex studio space. Use of the campus’ state-of-the-art darkroom facilities will enhance our work, and give us new ways to see and conceptualize witnessing.

This program is coordinated with Greener Foundations for first-year students. Greener Foundations is Evergreen’s in-person 2-quarter introductory student success course sequence, which provides first-year students with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive at Evergreen. Students expected to take Greener Foundations will be registered for a 2-credit Greener Foundations course in addition to this 14-credit program. 

First-year students who are not expected to take Greener Foundations or have been granted an exemption will register for 14-credits only. Find more details about who isn't expected to take Greener Foundations on the Greener Foundations website.

Anticipated Credit Equivalencies:

4- Expressive Therapy Foundations

4- Counseling Skills

4- Analog Photography

2- Ethics