Art therapy and music therapy for foreign minors at San Cristóbal School
Since last January, around 20 boys and girls from the San Cristóbal de Lorca school have taken part in a creative workshop, organised by the Cazalla Intercultural association, which aims to improve their integration into the cultural and social life of the city.
The pilot project, part of the Lab 31 project, financed by the European Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund Programme, is aimed at foreign or unaccompanied minors between the ages of 7 and 14.
The association has hired three monitors specialized in Art, Art Therapy and Music Therapy to develop this initiative. Sara Piernas, specialist in Art Therapy, explains that “the purpose of this technique is that children learn to express themselves freely through art, in all its expressions and that they know their emotions, that they know how to recognize them, that they know how to express them through game tools in a productive and positive way”.
In order to do so, they carry out dynamic activities of mutual knowledge, drawing, collective writing of stories and corporal expression, such as dance, theatre and music, during the afternoons of Tuesdays and Thursdays of this course. “They come with a lot of desire, they are enjoying it a lot,” says the instructor.
In addition to fighting for their inclusion in society, this workshop allows children to get to know themselves, their skills and increase their self-esteem through the development of their imagination, in the expression of their feelings and emotions, as well as in the communication and relationship with others while they play.
The group with which we work is a very sensitive children’s population, as we try to fight against their exclusion and promote their participation, eliminating and avoiding discrimination. “This workshop is going to help them a lot, because by being aware of how valuable they are, they are able to relate to the world and that they are no more and no less than anyone else”, explains Sara Piernas.
At the end of this workshop, the aim is for each of the children to carry out an individual project in which, as Sara explains, they express themselves “in the way they want and that they manage to materialise something artistic about everything they have been living”.
