Allison Barnes and Ramon Zabriskie, Experience and Design Management
Giving sunshine to Sunnyvale refers to bringing light and hope to the Sunnyvale community in Salt Lake City that is mainly comprised of refugees from many different countries. This project was to create a recreational therapy group for refugee children in this community. This took place at Lincoln Elementary school in a 5 week course where the children participated in experiential tasks to help them achieve therapeutic goals. These goals included teach them a greater emotional vocabulary and understanding, teach them how to develop healthy connections with their peers, and to teach them how to become more resourceful in the way they problem solve. The group of 4th grade (ages 9-10) elementary school students included about half refugees and almost all children in low socioeconomic statuses. In this group 10-15 students participated in tasks through the entire recreational therapy process; including assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation.
The assessment of these children was two-fold, both observational and written assessments. For the written assessment PERMA Profiler (Butler, 2015) was selected. The PERMA Profiler is short, and includes gathering information on social connections and ability to respond to deep emotions. These were two important outcomes desired from the group. The assessment was administered in a manner that the children could ask questions and receive a uniform answer.
From the observation assessment and written assessment many important pieces of information were gathered to ensure the optimal execution of recreational therapy for the children. The students had a lot of energy from just coming out of school so tasks were chosen that would keep the children moving and in a contained space. In just the short interactions the children showed small evidences of having gone through hard experiences and having lack of support from home because many of their parents were gone or working. Because of my observations with these things I have focused my RT sessions on teaching them to appropriately communicate their emotions. I hope that they can better learn how to identify, and communicate their feelings. As well as learn to cope with really hard things to an increased degree.
To implement the knowledge obtained from the assessment a plan was set forth to implement the appropriate experiential tasks. These tasks included physical and verbal challenges they needed to complete as a group, thus teaching them communication, resourcefulness, and emotion sharing task opportunities. A major block to their success was their lack of an emotional vocabulary, to assist in this the students drew pictures which they named “emoji’s” of different emotions they feel (See pictures below). Each student had to draw one emotion. The students were stretched to think of emotions that don’t easily come to mind. At the end of tasks, the students go stand by the emotion they are feeling and explain why they are feeling that emotion. Although this I a very simple way of processing what happened during the tasks, it is an effective way to allow these children to practice identifying and sharing the emotions they are feeling. It also is a fun way that keep them engaged instead of the traditional talk in a circle processing. To help them build their social networks the children participated in tasks where they had to to work together on. The students came closer together and learned to trust each other and listen to each other better. Transitions were times of great chaos, so interactive transitions were implemented to keep children engaged and focused. Another method that helped the children learn value lessons was to front load what they were going to do and what they were going to understand from each task. This allowed them to fully engage and learn from the tasks. Specific experiential tasks included blindfolded obstacle courses, matching pictures in a story with the order of the story, and lifting each other over a high rope as a whole group or in partnerships.
At the end of the last day, the students took a shorter version of the first written assessment. In analyzing the results of the data, it was found that recreational therapy assisted the children in having higher scores in positive areas of PERMA including positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments; and decreased loneliness and negative emotions. By averaging the scores of each group, it was found that in comparing group scores, that Recreational Therapy helped these children overall in most of the categories. These results are encouraging for Recreational Therapists to continue to find ways to work with refugees. These results vary because many children did not fully understand parts of the assessment, the sample size was not large enough, and the group of children each week varied slightly. The exact results were as follows. General feelings of positivity increased. General feelings of negativity decreased. Loneliness decreased. General happiness increased. As a category flow increased, but being excited and interested in life’s events slightly decreased. Feeling loved increased, but relationships as a category slightly decreased. Meaning slightly decreased. The category of accomplishment decreased slightly. When taking the limitations into consideration, these results can be interpreted to be understood that the children overall increased in the goals of the program and began to have a greater understanding of themselves and the world around them.