2022 Life of the Mind

 

Recent Submissions

  • Permission To Play: Expressive Arts Therapy for Team Building and Communication
    Avanzato, Olivia (2022)
    Permission To Play examines the use of Expressive Arts Therapy exercises as a method of staff development and team building, as well as facilitating interpersonal communication styles in a work environment. The project was conducted at a staff development retreat for the non-, Friends of Recovery:Delaware & Otsego Counties (FOR-DO). Staff from four branch locations participated in a two-hour workshop designed to provide education and an interactive experience to connect to build confidence around interpersonal communication. The presentation focused on five workplace communication styles, modeled after Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. Staff members identified their preferred way to receive appreciation in the workplace The group then participated in an activity in which they made “Communication Creatures” using an art therapy technique that involves all participants in a fast paced, drawing activity. Once their Communication Creature was created, each person presented it to their peers. Utilizing an Expressive Arts Therapy technique of personification, staff were able to introduce their creature with their preferred communication style, as well as a name for their creature. This supported a playful and safe environment to discuss communication preferences in a way that invited laughter and broke down hierarchical formality. An additional art therapy exercise focused on communication and team building through storytelling and drawing. The staff was divided into small groups and were each given the same story to create a poster showing what the story was about. Each group was given a different communication challenge that made the group drawing more difficult. After debriefing about the project, team members shared that communication challenges and strengths that came up in the project mirrored those that came up in their day-to-day work. The group then brainstormed how to shift the challenges. Using Expressive Arts Therapy techniques within a staff development environment is an innovative approach for colleagues to address communication issues in a playful, creative way. This workshop can be duplicated and customized to offer a new approach to staff development within any organization or department.

  • Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour
    Arango, Gustavo (2022)
    Over the last twelve months, I have been working on a collection of essays and journalistic articles on the life, works, and social and cultural background of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez was considered “the most prominent living writer in the Spanish language” (The New York Times, March 7, 2007). Over almost four decades, I have read and studied his life and works from multiple perspectives: as a regular reader, as an aspiring writer, as a journalist, as a biographer, and as a literary scholar. Between 1990 and 1997, while working as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Universal (Cartagena de Indias), I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing García Márquez on several occasions. In 1995, I published the book Un ramo de nomeolvides (A Bouquet of Forget-me-nots), a chronicle about García Márquez’s beginnings as a writer and journalist in El Universal (1948-1950). The book included testimonies by García Márquez and his friends during the early stages of his writing career, as well as a selection of recovered texts by García Márquez, found during my research at the newspaper’s archives. In December 1997, I had the opportunity to be García Márquez´s pupil in the Workshop on Narrative Journalism offered by his foundation for the promotion of journalism (Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, FNPI), in Barranquilla, Colombia. Over the last three decades, as a university professor, I have taught, researched, and written extensively about García Márquez's works. Gabriel García Márquez: Caribbean Troubadour, my first book written in English, is a contribution to the general knowledge of García Márquez in the English-speaking world, not only from the scholar’s point of view but also from the perspective of someone who shares his cultural and historical background and who has reflected about the themes and deeper structures of his work. It will be published by Lexington Book in the Spring of 2023.