Shaping Our Future: What Are Our Professional Responsibilities to Art Therapy Students?

This paper describes the results of a workshop with two groups representing a total of 25 art therapists who met to gain a better understanding of the knowledge base of art therapy and professional identity, and the importance of including prescribed content area in curricula. Although recognizing the limited scope of the survey, the paper attempts to offer valuable perspectives by including art therapy educators in Group 1 and practitioners who, for the most part, had under 5 years of clinical/field experience in Group 2. The former group desires to offer quality and responsible education to students; the latter group is daily working directly with patients and applying knowledge acquired with a fairly recently conferred Master's degree. A questionnaire was given to each group and they were asked to do two drawings. The first asked for reflection on how one interacts with one's mentor and the second for how one teaches/supervises.