Going Beyond Words

A picture of a cartoon face with its eyes tight shut and both hands covering its ears hung in a corner of a classroom in Public School 255 in Flushing, Queens. It read ‘STOP: too loud!’ in bold black letters. In another corner, 11-year-old Tana sat in a blue metal chair, screaming and hitting her hands together. “Don’t you shush me,” she snapped at her teacher before putting both her fists in her mouth. Seconds later she started howling and stomping her feet against the wooden floor.

“Make it stop,” pleaded her classmate, a dark haired boy her age, voicing the agitation of the other four students. “She’s having a rough day,” said Cheryl Mayber apologetically, in a soft voice. Mayber is one of the teachers in P.S. 255, which educates students with autism, a brain development disorder that causes difficulties in social interaction and communication.

Mayber asked her assistant to take Tana out in the hallway for a while so she could continue the class.

The lesson for the day that Monday morning in December was for the children to work together to lay down tape on the wooden floor and make a floor map. Two long strips of dark blue tape ran side by side with green and red crosses pasted between the lines on both ends of a makeshift ramp. Mayber asked the five children in the small classroom to get up from their chairs and hop on and off the green cross. They were then asked to move between the blue lines from one cross to the other. With singer Pharrell William’s “Happy” playing in the background, each child took turns, first walking, then tiptoeing and finally taking leaps from one end of the room to the other.

One girl had to be taken slowly by her hands while she stared at the floor. “Look at me,” Mayber sang while guiding her. The girl, with dark black hair falling slightly below her shoulders, timidly looked up for a second and quickly turned her gaze back to her feet. She then made her way to her chair, sat down and rolled her head down to her knees. It is almost painful for some autistic children to even make eye contact.

The other children strode toward each other in pairs from either end of the room and stopped in the middle, where they were told to greet each other, ask a question and look into each other’s eyes while doing it.

Some shook hands; others high-fived. With the help of these colored paper tapes, and some dance and music, Mayber met a critical underlying goal: making eye contact.

These activities, which on the surface looked like they were meant for the children to have fun, had a deeper purpose. They are part of an initiative called Everyday Arts for Special Education, or EASE.

Urban Arts Partnership, a New York City-based nonprofit, has developed and administered the program. It brings in “teaching artists” — working musicians, theater actors, and visual artists with education experience — to mentor elementary special educators like Cheryl Mayber, and arts teachers on how to weave the arts into their teaching.

Laying down the tape and asking questions in pairs was intended to help these children, who are on the autism spectrum, to step out of their personal boundaries and form a connection to their peers.

Autism spectrum disorder, a group of developmental disabilities, can cause social, communication and behavioral challenges. Individuals with autism may have difficulty expressing themselves through words, gestures, facial expressions, and touch. For them, art can be a way to express themselves when they have trouble using their voice.

Research conducted by the American Art Therapy Association suggests that art not only helps to ease anxiety for a child diagnosed on the autism spectrum, but also improves social interaction.

Arts in education has even made its way into New York’s special education district, District 75, in the form of EASE. Public School 255 is one of the ten schools in which the initiative was introduced in 2010.

The district received a $4.6 million federal grant four years ago to offer professional development in EASE, which is serving 40,795 students.

Mayber is getting training in EASE from Joan Merwyn, who is not only a teaching artist, but also the curriculum designer for the initiative and a professional development special needs teacher.

Merwyn, 63, has been training teachers from ten schools in District 75 for over three years now. The thing about autism is “one size fits none,” she said intensely glaring through her round glasses.

Many of the children she meets in the schools are non-verbal. “They have thoughts in their head that they can’t get out and as a result get frustrated,” she said.

These children become aggressive and like Tana, can get violent.

Tana’s teachers use picture symbols and rewards to reinforce positive behavior. ‘Put your hands down,’ read one. ‘No nose picking,’ goes another.

When a child is diagnosed with autism, his parents are advised to use several forms of treatment. The most popular is behavior modification therapy, which aims at shaping behavior through a system of rewards and consequences. They are seldom led towards art.

Dr. Jaime Fleckner Black, 34, a licensed psychologist and said that even though the benefits of art are well known, not many therapists make use of it. “They don’t teach you art therapy in graduate school,” she said.

She treats children and adults with Asperger’s syndrome or high functioning autism. Majority of them face problems with social interaction and have trouble initiating friendship. “If you can’t pick up your phone to call or make plans with someone, or can’t hold a conversation for long, it will eventually affect your emotional condition,” said Black.

Some autistic children find it easier to speak through the art material “rather than with words,” said Dana Whiddon, 34, a creative art therapist based in mid-town Manhattan.

Whiddon has been running a private practice for eight years, treating children and young adults with autism through art.

The mini art gallery, which she calls her office, is a cozy room filled with crayons, bottles of paint and dirty brushes of all sizes, its white walls lined with colorful drawings and hand paintings.

No two children on the autism spectrum wrestle with the same obstacles, she said. If she is working with a child who is non verbal, her approach is different than how she treats a child who is on the Asperger’s side, highly verbal and able to draw with great detail. Thus, Whiddon’s therapy is fluid and she said she is constantly flexible in her approach.

The main problem for individuals with autism is “engaging and relating to other people,” said Whiddon, her face lit with the warm glow of a yellow light in the room. “Once you address these, the other side things go away.”

If a child is having a hard day, Whiddon works to calm them down and help make eye contact. Others might be able to have long conversations with her and play. “If your body is not comfortable or you’re too anxious then you can’t process what is going on in the world,” she said.

Autistic children can often get stuck on repetition of sounds, movements and even objects and Whiddon has to find a way to make this interactive.

A boy she has been treating for two years shows signs of such compulsive behavior. The nine-year-old often became self absorbed and dug his hand into a pile of sand, take out a fistful and slowly drop the grains in front of his face. Once again he trust his small, chubby hand in the sand to took out another fistful, and once again he dropped it back into the pile. He got lost in his world doing this.

“How can I make this a game?” Whiddon thought to herself.

Whiddon took sheets of red, yellow and green colored tissue paper, ripped them up into tiny pieces and put them in a pile. She then picked several bits of it and began showering them over a plastic tree to show the falling of leaves in autumn. She wanted to fit the activity into the context of a real-world experience for him, she said.

‘‘What color do you want?’’ she asked to get his attention.

“Ooh, my turn to drop it,” the boy chimed in response and the bits of paper soon replaced sand.

Soon he began interacting with Whiddon and had a beautiful tree to look at.

“The children look at you and there is a glimmer in their eyes and you know they are connected to you,” Whiddon said, her lips softening into a smile. “You want them to have a connection and that for me is what the work is all about.”

Many children on the autism spectrum may have trouble being creative. They sit and copy out letters with crayons instead of using their imagination. For them, Whiddon makes use of a more versatile material — clay.

When they are not bound by a sheet of paper and crayons to work with, clay can make their ideas three dimensional, she said.

Some children with autism don’t like getting messy or even being touched. They resist hugging or any other type of contact, which can be hard on their families. There are those who may want to strip down if they get even a single drop of water on their clothes.

Immersing their hands in clay and getting their faces dirty while working in the pottery wheel makes such children more tolerant to touch.

There really just isn’t one single approach that Whiddon can follow. Rigidity, both in behavior and in thinking, is typical of some autistic children. Whiddon has to see how they use the art materials. Pencils are more rigid than paint and a child has much more control over it. If a child is uptight, she offers them paint gradually over time. “Maybe the paint is too messy and that will allow them to be out of form,” she explained.

When parents seek her out, they have to make sure that their child is comfortable in her presence. Not all of them are. Some warm up to her over time. Whiddon sees her job as getting into the child’s world, making them at ease and then drawing them out.

Her work is a tangled web of satisfaction and frustration. Art therapy is a natural fit for those who have trouble speaking their mind without words. It is seldom seen that way, though. Hardly any parent will go out of the way to seek art therapy. “If an autistic child’s pediatrician knows about a therapist, only then he will recommend it,” she sighed.

Resistance towards art can come from several directions. For art therapist Elaine Oswald, it was from the teachers at The HeartShare School in Bath Avenue and Bay 19th Street in Brooklyn.

The non-profit school has a contract with the New York City Department of Education to provide special educational services to children with autism spectrum disorder.

The school does not have an art room. There are nine classes grouped by age and developmental level of the students. Oswald is their art teacher and she goes in each class three times a week with paints, brushes, crayons, pencils, glue and shaving cream. Yes, shaving cream.

“For many kids it is soothing. It helps them focus and relax,” said Oswald. For children who can’t tolerate being touched and who often get upset and frustrated just seeing others being touched, feeling the soft cream on their hands can help make them more tolerant.

Oswald, 47, has been working with the school for over four years. “Art should be a meaningful experience,” she said, with a hint of a smile on her long, oval face. Her dark rimmed, round glasses rest on her head and push back her slightly greying hair.

The value comes from aiding the children to explore and express themselves using art materials; crafting appealing artwork is not the goal. “I don’t interpret or analyze the pieces,” she said.

She does a lot of teaching of art as well. Oswald said she wants the children to understand how to use the materials and have a sense of mastery, but for her the end goal is that of self-expression.

The change through art is slow. It can take several weeks or even years for change to show in a child.

Oswald has a 12-year-old student who is on the autism spectrum. “He is one of my favorites,” she said with a chuckle. He had very little interest in art when she first met him four years ago. He would sit in a corner, lost in his own world, when the whole class would be working on their pieces. “He would put everything in his mouth,” she said. “He would eat glue stick and lick paint brushes.”

Oswald would constantly have to remind him to smear the material on paper instead of putting it in his mouth. He had no interest in painting or using any of the other materials. “For a good one year he was just eating glue stick,” she said, shaking her head, her delicate silver necklace swinging along.

After four years, he has now begun to love art. He helps Oswald set up the material at the start of every class. He engages himself with the movement of crayons or paintbrushes and has started making choices about the colors he wants to use. “I can see his work going from being beyond chaotic to having detail and form,” said Oswald.

When she began working at the school, she was often at odds with the other teachers. “The staff has an educational model,” she said. They have a mindset of being in a “school structured with goals.”

She struggles to find a way for art in the academic environment, which she said has become easier over time. “Now if I’m sick and I don’t come to school, the teachers tell me that kids really missed me,” she said. They see that art helps the kids focus and calm down and “it’s a big part of their day.”

For Tana, leaving her classroom with the assistant teacher on the third floor of P.S. 255 didn’t calm her down. When she walked in several minutes later, she dropped on the floor, started sobbing and refused to get up. She began kicking the air and hit a girl with her leg. This led another child to wail and sobbing in response. It took a few more teaching assistants to console both girls who were dressed in matching white t-shirts and pink pants.

The behavior and moods of the children vary every day. Some classes end up being chaotic and no work gets done, so there can’t be a fixed schedule, said Merwyn, who is in the first year of training the teacher and assistants of Tana’s class in EASE activities.

When Tana watched her classmates walking from the green cross in one end of the room to the red cross in another, dancing and interacting along the way, she slowly stopped screaming and biting, and rose from her seat to join them. Her arms glued down to either side of her waist, as she had been told to do, she tiptoed from the green cross to the red. “Good job!” said her teacher, who was minutes ago bit by Tana, smiling and lightly touching her shoulders.

“Here, we roll with the punches,” said Merwyn, seeing the chaos Tana had made. Even making a ball out of a tin foil can be a breakthrough for some children on the spectrum of autism. “You’ve to look for these little miracles that you create.”