Expressive Arts Within a Liberation Psychology Framework in Field Education

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents a powerful connection between the arts and practicum learning. A liberation psychology framework is deployed to cultivate students’ critical consciousness, to honor diversity, and to explore sensory ways of knowing. Described is the integration of expressive arts into fieldwork and assignments to promote self-awareness, advocacy, and social justice. The chapter expresses the belief that social work has lost its historic relationship to the arts; this loss of connectivity is viewed as a “tragedy,” one that has separated “the social worker from the poet, the dancer, the musician, the painter, the dramatist, the hip-hop rapper, and the filmmaker.”