CoAT: A Community-based Therapeutic Approach in Educational Environments

Every school is a vivid community with staff, parents and their children experiencing, acting and communicating ceaselessly. At school, groups and subgroups form, and struggle their existence. Life, not theory, is learned through real-time communal experience. And yet, does school use these potentials consciously to afford rich social learning, participation and well-being? The Israeli school system predefined as socially inclusive still operates mainly from medical and functional points of view: students diagnosed with diverse conditions are offered supportive-lessons, allied health sessions, as well as arts-therapies, to improve the students’ participation. School arts therapists practice mainly individual or small group psychotherapy with a distinct professional language and in separate environments. This chapter’s writers suggest that the prevailing psychotherapeutic approach at schools can be complemented with a parallel approach: the Community Arts Therapies (CoAT). The CoAT approach relies upon the social model of disability, on empowerment theories and post-humanistic philosophies. It offers different intervention tools, crossing the boundaries of the traditional setting, involving any number of willing community members in artistic expression, planning and creation. Through CoAT, the therapy-user’s existing potentials are nurtured, and participation is encouraged. The following chapter explains CoAT. The case-stories we share are substance for discussion on the relevance of a community approach in therapy for the Israeli inclusive-education policy.