Description: Trauma Informed Teaching through Play Art Narrative (PAN) provides ideas, insight, and activities to guide teachers in helping children and youth work through trauma in a creative reparative process.
Brief description:
Karen O. Wallace, BCATR, M.Ed., FOT is an Art & Play Therapist. She teaches in Educational Counselling Psychology and ECE at the University of Regina. She is the author of There is No Need to Talk about This (Sense Publishers, 2015).
Patrick J. Lewis, Ph.D., is Professor of ECE at the University of Regina. He studies play and storytelling, has published many articles, and authored the two monographs How We Think But Not in School (Sense Publishers, 2007) and Challenges Bequeathed (Sense Publishers, 2009).
Review Quotes: " In this relatively brief book, Wallace and Lewis offer a comprehensive description of the benefits of play, art, and narrative (PAN) as tools for helping children deal with trauma. The first two sections review the theoretical and research background of the PAN curriculum as well as the nature and sources of trauma. The third section provides examples of specific activities to use with the children in helping them deal with the effects of their trauma. Because one of the authors is an art and play therapist, these suggestions are detailed, varied, and useful. The authors specifically review the fight/flight/freeze responses typical of those traumatized as well as examples of teachers' reactions to children's classroom behaviors. They also discuss the need for teachers to examine their own experiences and beliefs, in addition to sources of trauma, such as racism, dysfunctional families, crime, terrorism, and war. The analysis overall clearly describes the impact of traumas on cognitive development. Schools need to understand this problem and change their educational techniques to help children find ways to move beyond traumatic experiences and become competent learners and socially functional people." - S. Sugarman, Bennington College in CHOICE 58:6 (2021).