Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Refugee and immigrant families entering the United States are often relocated to communities in which they are separated from their new neighbors by ethnicity, language, social customs, socio-economic status, and so forth. Communities often want to welcome and help them, but stark cultural differences can too easily lead to misunderstandings and fear. The children and adolescents in these families have a particularly difficult time adjusting to the social environment of school where they long to fit in with their same age peers but lack the language and social skills, while at the same time feeling guilt about “abandoning” their home country and needing support and therapy to cope with the trauma they have encountered in their lives. Refugee and immigrant adolescents in a small Midwest city in the U.S.A. provided the opportunity for stakeholders in the community to come together as a group and work towards finding ways that the arts, and particularly music, could play a role in facilitating the development of a community in which the kids feel welcomed and understood. Action research provided the perfect structure for meeting these challenges head on. This session will tell the story of the development of a community music therapy resource through the process of action research. Challenges and obstacles of working as a collaborative action research team will be described, as will the unexpected treasures that have been uncovered through the process. Benefits of the action research process will be discussed.