The arts allow us to access deep components of ourselves that are not easily available through other means. They also allow us to gain new perspectives on our culture and the world around us. Perhaps this is at the heart of why people are so passionate about art.

In this team-taught, full-time program, students will study developmental psychology and psychological underpinnings of artistic expression and will design arts activities for presentation within the class and for use as social health care projects beyond the campus. Students will integrate their knowledge of these areas to create inter-modal art-centered activities designed to reduce stress and increase resilience and social skills for diverse communities and age groups, including international refugee populations. The student-designed, art-centered activities might take many forms, such as online instructions, a video piece, a tabletop game or interactive theatre workshops. 

We will make use of cognitive and experiential approaches to learning in order to introduce students to skills and concepts needed to increase their understanding of cognitive, emotional, mental, and physical contexts of developmental psychology. The program will integrate theories with practice to explore diverse resources from personal to global in scale as well as guide students toward creating multi-modal arts-based modules that can become part of an international curriculum on social health care to build resilience and promote creativity for people of diverse ages and to reduce conflict in displaced communities. Students will also develop knowledge and presentation skills by conducting research into a topic of their choosing, related to their arts-presentation project, and presenting it in an appropriate format at the end of the term.