AFFIRMATIONS FOR TEXAS ACTION PROJECT

Someone just told me the other day about TAP. TAP is the Texas Action Project. I was really excited to find out more about what TAP is doing on a "grass roots" basis by taking art, creativity, consciousness-raising, and intuitive education into classrooms and wherever children can be found. More power and work to you TAP!

Over the last sixteen months, I have been, along with many friends and allies, have been in the process of bringing to birth a nonprofit known as Sunbear Community Alliance (please check out www.chrisbearbeam.com and click on the "trainings" icon, and you'll find out more about the kinds of training that SCA offerings; you'll also find poetry and essays by Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. the Executive Director. One of the pieces of SCA's mission is to collaborate to do presentations that enhance intercultural understanding through the Arts and Social Education. We want to collaborate with other groups, such as TAP, in working to change the community through art, creativity and social education around social justice issues that affect all of us. The many isms we're surrounded by on all sides seem to flourish: isms like racism, sexism, adultism, able-ism, heterosexism, fundamentalism continue to be weeds that flourish. However there are reasons they flourish.

One of those is that children often miss the side of education (the affective-social) that will enable them to view all people as human beings, not as souless, inferior objects. The Arts is such an effective means of teaching. Art gets our attention at the intuitive, non-rational place in our brains. This open door opens a dialogue and an openness to use our minds to rationally talk about our views on how we might change our living environments. We can challenge ourselves and others on what can be observed in our world around us. We can choose whether to believe in worn out ideas that simply don't work anymore, we can put up our shields of cognitive dissonance and run from the problem areas, or we can commit to seek out ideas that align themselves with the scientific basis of life. I think that both of these dimensions of our humaneness, the creative/intuitional and the rational/scientific domains of our brains, need to be engaged in this process.

I've used art in structured groups of children. Since I'm a spoken word artist/poet, it's been my practice to integrate artistic mediums into the social education presentations. Largely this has been done by using an anti-racism model and providing pro-active insights into appreciating difference, becoming culturally competent, and understanding the historical-psycho-social aspects of racism in our nation.

I'm so happy to see TAP's website, to view the video, and to see their mission statement. I hope that sometime in the future, our organizations may collaborate together.

Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. may be reached at: cosmicbeam@hotmail.com.