{"id":184,"date":"2025-11-05T16:34:56","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T21:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/contemplative-pedagogy\/?post_type=chapter&p=184"},"modified":"2026-03-24T11:17:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T15:17:33","slug":"building-community-through-expressive-arts-based-practices","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbooks.concordia.ca\/contemplative-pedagogy\/chapter\/building-community-through-expressive-arts-based-practices\/","title":{"raw":"Contemplative collage practice","rendered":"Contemplative collage practice"},"content":{"raw":"

Beth Berila<\/h4>\r\nCategory \/ branch (in the tree of contemplative practices<\/a>):<\/strong> Creative \u2013 contemplative arts\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_488\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"700\"]\"Printed Photo by George Milton from Pexels[\/caption]\r\n\r\n
\r\n\r\nContemplative expressive arts are accessible and inspiring ways to access deeper knowing, build community, work with what is, and co-create collective visions. There are many forms of expressive arts contemplative practices, of course. This piece will focus on collage, as it can easily be done without any creative background.\r\n\r\nThe workshop[footnote]I will use the term \u201cworkshop\u201d in this article, but this practice is well-suited to classroom space as well. Timing and how the sections flow would be adjusted based on the length of time available and how often you meet.[\/footnote] I facilitated for the Contemplative Practices Summit (2025) used collage to explore inclusion and belonging: what is, what we long for, what blocks it, and what we collectively vision. Depending on the time you have available and the group you are working with, each stage of the prompts can take longer or shorter, but it is powerful if there is time to move through all the prompts. This collage practice can be adapted to a variety of topics and explorations.\r\n\r\nI advise sending people the workshop purpose and framing along with some journal prompts prior to the workshop. The journal prompts should include an invitation to find 8-10 (or more) images that represent what they journalled about or discovered in their journaling (Alternatively, you can send a recorded guided meditation or visualization). But the idea is to help participants begin their reflection journey prior to the actual workshop and also to bring several images that are meaningful to them, so they don\u2019t have to spend time actually looking during the workshop itself.\r\n\r\nFor the actual collage making, how you go about it will differ based on whether you are facilitating it in-person or digitally. If in-person, have many different art supplies available, such as glue, scissors, magazines, decorative paper, paint, stencils, etc. If digital, use a tool like a whiteboard so participants can easily add images. (Some tools allow participants to participate anonymously, which may be important, and you want to make sure you prepare participants if they need an account beforehand or can just join your account). If doing the event digitally, allow a few moments to give a little tutorial about the technology for people for whom it is new.\r\n\r\nThe beauty and magic of collage (and most expressive arts modalities) is its ability to tap into our intuitive, deeper knowing and longing as well as our creativity, so we want to set that tone for the practice.\r\n\r\nFor the workshop I facilitated, I started with some short centering breaths, and since we were doing our practice digitally, I invited people to offer kindness and compassion to someone else on the screen on their exhale and receive it on their inhale. There are other ways to facilitate connection digitally, and some element of that would be helpful, especially if the participants may not know each other\u2013some way to facilitate a sense of connection before asking them to co-create and even be vulnerable with one another.\r\n\r\nThen I gave a little context and framing about the topic of the workshop, in this case, a combination of contemplative expressive arts, belonging, and inclusion.\u00a0 We want the bulk of the time to be for the practice.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Framework for a collage workshop<\/h1>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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