POSITION: ART THERAPIST FOR DC PHOTO NARRATIVE PROJECT
Looking for an art therapist to lead this project, hopefully with interest in photo-documentary and written/oral narrative to work with at risk inner city youth.
Responsibilities:
• Meet twice weekly for two hours per meeting with a group at risk adolescents for 15 weeks. Task is to help students to pause and reflect about their lives, developing a narrative of photos and words that give meaning to their experiences. (Each student is given a digital camera.)
• Computer/Photoshop skills very helpful.
• In addition to weekly meetings, work both with and without students to edit photos and transcribe narratives, culminating in an exhibition of students’ work.
• Weekly supervision with Ben Forman, PhD, clinical psychologist, who has either run or directed this project for the past six years.
Background: One of the difficulties that adolescents in Ward 8 face is that they have no stories except those that are offered to them on the nightly news and in local newspapers and magazines. The images and words are often discouraging. The stories are typically told about them rather than by them. Alternatively, they are offered images of teen life in reality shows like “My Sweet Sixteen” where parents are throwing extravagant affairs for their coming of age children who know no limits. The adolescents in Ward 8 may share similar dreams of prom dates and limousines, of careers, and of love. In this sense, they are like other teenagers their age. At the same they are faced with concerns that the average adolescent does not confront: violence and poverty, unstable families, and racial discrimination. It is an experience of ongoing trauma. It is an experience that is disorganizing and frightening.
Specific Aims: Through this project, participants will have the opportunity to give voice to their stories and find/create coherence out of the chaos that is so much a part of their lives. In so doing, we hope they will feel empowered and that we will be able to reduce the negative effects of trauma– the hopelessness and helplessness, the feelings of isolation, low self-esteem and numbing out that inevitably follow from such trauma. An assumption of this project is that in telling their stories, in creating a coherent narrative that may be either uplifting or disappointing, they will assert the meaningfulness of their lives and feel themselves affirmed. And as much as anything, the real task here is to get these adolescents to pause and become more reflective (thinking and feeling as opposed to numbing or acting out) about their lives and their experience.
Salary: $3,000.
For further information, contact Ben Forman, PhD, Executive Director, Center for Self Discovery DC. bensonforman@gmail.com 301 986 0626
