Back to School! Compose for Change: Healing Arts class
- Pamela Ruiter -Feenstra
- Sep 2
- 4 min read
A Virtual Course by Healing Bells
Dr. Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra, Professor
I always love the beginning of a new school year: Watching the neighbor kids walk together to school, backpacks in tow, hearing high-pitched excited (and maybe a little nervous) voices talking about their anticipation for the new school year. A fresh start. A reset button.
As a professor, I have the same excited (and maybe a little nervous) anticipation at the beginning of each semester. I’m eager to meet my new students. I wonder how their interests will shape our class dynamic. I wonder what I’ll learn from them. I wonder what stories are going on in their lives outside of class.
Education can be a mirror to our current local, national, and global situation. Education can be a window to building collaborations, and searching for solutions to the issues of our time. Education can help us ask important questions.
In our work at Healing Bells, we ask questions such as:
How can we engage the arts to tell stories that have been censored, silenced, or ignored?
How can we celebrate cultures and learn from the wisdom of people whose voices have been missing from these conversations?
How can the arts open a healing pathway to people?
What can we do to repair a world that seems increasingly violent and divisive?
Addressing these questions requires human connection and kindness, deep openhearted listening, courage to enter difficult conversations, and healthy open communication. These attributes are at the heart of our new series of Healing Bells classes called Compose for Change: Healing Arts.
BREAKING NEWS!
The Compose for Change: Healing Arts virtual class series will drop in January! Sign up here to indicate your interest!
Over the past three years, I’ve created a series of Healing Bells virtual courses–including a certificate program–to raise critical questions and to work together to find potential healing arts solutions to social issues of our time.
The class series is called Compose for Change: Healing Arts. Participants choose one or more social issues that they care about, and build skills and strategies in how to address those issues through works of art (similar to what we do at Healing Bells!). As making credible storytelling art requires research, interviewing people impacted by the issues, and fact checking, participants have the opportunity to bolster their arts activism skills by scaffolding trauma-sensitive research, writing, and presentation skills in addition to creating a thoughtful work of art.
When I’ve led in-person workshops and seminar courses to test some of this material, participants called it “cathartic,” “healing," and “the most important class I’ve ever taken." They listed some aspects that stood out to them:
Being able to choose issues that matter to them is affirming;
The support from the healing arts methods we’ve developed helps transform their feelings of helplessness and hopelessness into empowerment; and
Creating art, researching, and presenting about social issues that matter to them helped them to find their voice and feel heard.
In the course, participants will
Explore the wisdom of global majority arts activists on whose shoulders we stand: Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (see photos), and many more. Let their wisdom seep into your synapses, and know that we are joining a lineage of brave, tenacious, passionate souls who dare to stand up to injustices and work for change through the arts.
Ask how and why the arts are an effective medium to tell stories that prompt social change.
Investigate the 5 stages of trauma and healing, and how to unpack them in your artwork and research.
Be among the first to view and analyze some of our trailblazing Healing Bells content that has not yet been made public.
Dig deeply into intersectionality. Understand how intersecting layers of social issues impact people. It's essential to address multiple issues simultaneously. They're all connected.
Create your own artwork to address a social issue you care about. “Compose” is defined broadly and can include cultural art traditions, music, painting, theatre, sketching, dance, film, poetry, slide shows, posters, handwork, jewelry making, sewing, quilting, weaving, script writing, children’s book illustrations, graphic novels, nature collages, etc. (Note that participants must have an intermediate or higher level of skill in the art form they choose.)
Learn trauma-sensitive interviewing and writing techniques.
Hone deep listening skills, with empathy and acceptance. (It helps in relationships, too!)
Dismantle hierarchical systems: patriarchy, authoritarianism, racism, LGBTQIA2S+ phobias, ability biases, misogyny, colonization, humanitarian crises, class and socioeconomic stratas.
Foster strengths-based antiracist approaches to storytelling via the arts.
Delve into collective healing and collaborative arts co-creations. (We can accomplish more together than any one of us can do alone!)
Practice effective and passionate presentation methods. (I can't wait to show you these dynamite blueprints!)
Become an impactful arts activist! Let’s talk about ways to measure impact, and how to implement tools from word-of-mouth, to blogs, websites, social media, etc.
Gain a supportive community. (We all need this!)
Keep asking questions! That’s how we keep learning and pivoting to address issues of our time.
In next week’s blog, Beekeeper Kay Hanna-DeLuca will reveal what bees can teach us about supportive communities. Catch it when it drops on Tuesdays! See you there at https://healingbellsglobal.com!
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