Welcome to Ep 164: Creative and Expressive Learning Pathways with Jill Weidknecht Van Horne. Jill Weidknecht Van Horne, PhD, is my friend and colleague and is an Associate Professor and the Program Director of the Professional School Counseling Program at Appalachian State University. She is also the past president of the European Branch of the American Counseling Association and past vice-president of the North Carolina Association for Play Therapy. Her equine therapy class has been featured on our local PBS affiliate UNC-TV and I have a link to that video and her newly released book for which she is an editor writing under the name Jill Weidknecht in the resources. The book is Treatment Planning, Writing, and Documentation in Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals. In our conversation, we discuss the connections between UDL and expressive and creative arts therapies and consider how her work in play therapy and equine-assisted therapy provides an empathetic lens for her to better understand learner variability and the various pathways for learning in her students. Thank you for listening to the Think UDL podcast!
Resources
UNC-TV/PBS “How Horses Can Help with Mental Health” (video, 5 min)
ETC and Connection to UDL Simplified
Photo of horse with yellow bracelet braided into mane (mentioned by Jill Weidknecht Van Horne in podcast) Photo courtesy of Beth Allen.
Transcript
1:03:07
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal Design for Learning, creative and expressive arts, equine-assisted therapy, play therapy, learner variability, multisensory approaches, non-directive play therapy, therapeutic relationships, child development, experiential learning, mental health professionals, therapeutic modalities, student engagement, educational outcomes.
SPEAKERS
Lillian Nave, Jill Weidknecht Van Horne
Lillian Nave 00:00
Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast, where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding, and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to episode 164: Creative and expressive learning pathways with Jill Weidnecht Van Horne. Dr. Jill Weidknecht Van Horne is my friend and colleague, and is an associate professor and the program director of the Professional School Counseling Program at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She is also the past president of the European branch of the American Counseling Association and past vice president of the North Carolina Association for Play Therapy. Her equine-assisted therapy class has been featured on our local PBS affiliate UNC TV, and I have a link to that video in her newly released book, for which she is an editor writing under the name Jill Weidnecht, in the resource section of today’s episode. The book is treatment planning, writing, and documentation in creative and expressive arts therapies: a guide for mental health professionals, and in our conversation, we discuss the connections between universal design for learning and expressive and creative arts therapies, and consider how her work in play therapy and equine-assisted therapy provides an empathetic lens for her to better understand learner variability and the various pathways for learning in her students. Thank you so much for listening to this episode where I get to talk to my friend Jill, and thanks for listening to the Think UDL podcast, Dr. Jill Weidknecht Van Horne. Thank you for joining me on the Think UDL podcast.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 02:19
I am very excited to be here in this capacity, for sure.
Lillian Nave 02:23
Yes, yes, I really appreciate you. I pulled you on when I interviewed Temple Grandin, and I thought I needed a little bit of help. So, thank you in that, which is an excellent episode. We’ll have a link to that in the resources, but wanted to have you on the podcast because you are doing some really interesting things that help me to think about UDL in some expanded capacities, and I think will also help our listeners just to think about different ways of processing information. And we’re going to look at it through your field in therapy and counseling. But I also think it’s helpful for us to see how. I mean, you’ve taught me so much about how our brains work and how we can kind of move through things and understand things better in multiple modalities. So that’s why I thought let’s have a talk. So let me start with my first question I ask all my guests, and that is, Jill, what makes you a different kind of learner.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 03:21
All right. Well, so when I was, I guess let me let me say this. My initial reaction is to start telling stories. So that right there, I think is part of the piece, right? So that that’s part of it for me personally. But I have always been a a relational learner, an experiential learner. I walk through stores. I like to touch garments. I like to I like to smell smells. But I also, when I was a child, I also one of the instruments I played. I played drums. I always had to like have hands on, hands in. I’m just a very kinesthetic learner personally. So if you’re looking for the type of different kind of learner I am that for sure, and then of course I have some very distractible tendencies. If you look, I’ve probably got no less than 40 tabs available, and that’s only on one screen. And I have two screens here. So anyway, I think those are some of the pieces that it took me a while to figure out. It’s okay for me to figure out what works for me growing up, but I don’t want to say it wasn’t supported. I think it just wasn’t explored by a lot of my educators or mentors, and so that was a path I had to carve for myself. So then, when I started to find, you know, my people out there, I realized, oh, there’s some real giftedness to the way that I am, as opposed to seeing it as something that’s a hindrance or a liability.
Lillian Nave 04:45
So you tapped into that as a strength. Your kind of learning difference, I would say, right?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 04:51
For sure, I was well aware of where it didn’t work. Yeah, there were definitely places that I was told like this. This doesn’t work, but yeah, I definitely feel. Out where where it was appreciated, or valued, or or used.
Lillian Nave 05:03
Yeah, so that reframing is so important, and definitely something I’ve learned in doing this podcast is first of all to reframe those differences or what seem to be barriers are usually not actually a barrier at all. They are just an environmental issue that we have to reframe and figure out what’s going to work. Okay, so thank you very much. We get to talk a lot as colleagues and as friends, and I will have to say that stories is something that I always learn a lot from. Like every time we have a discussion. It’s contextualized by so many really good stories. Like it always starts out with, “Hey, you know, when you were a kid and you did this, it was like, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I can understand that. So, okay. So, in your professional life, you are you teach our school counselors at our university, and also professional counseling. So I know that you teach multiple theories about counseling. And when people think about therapy, and when I think about therapy, I think about talk therapy. I also think about tests and assessments, diagnoses, even labels. I mean, that’s often in the school system what we come for and kind of try to figure out what’s this called. But you’re also involved in a variety of other avenues for therapy that I think are really interesting. And I thought that this would be a really great contextualization of different ways people learn UDL. So, can you tell me more about those other avenues for therapy?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 06:48
Yes, and I’m so sorry people can’t see me because I’m over here nodding my head in agreement. Yes, yes, you’re right. You’re right. The stories, the people, the theories, all the things. So, I think as you’re talking. I’m also thinking like, what do I want to make sure listeners get out of this? And I think one of the things I have quite a few, but one of the things I’d like to have folks get out of this is that maybe if you’ve tried counseling in the past and it hasn’t really worked, there’s a lot of other options out there. That’s not the only reason. That’s not what I’m trying to sell. But I was just thinking, you know what? Maybe somebody’s listening, and they go, “Yeah, that talk therapy stuff that was lied, did not work. But there are there are so many other different types of approaches that can be used, just as we know with UDL, right? So just as we know that there’s so many approaches out there. If this doesn’t work, no problem. We’ve got three or four other things like boom, boom, boom, boom, ready to go. So we’ll find something that works for folks. So traditional approaches, you know, assessment, diagnosis, often written down. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of rubrics that are used. There’s there’s books, of course. There’s charts, et cetera, et cetera. And we do always cross reference those when we are doing the practice of counseling and school counseling. You know, when we’re talking about whether people are doing agency work or whether they’re doing professional school counseling in schools, we do cross-reference them. Even if we do creative and expressive arts with them, maybe say like play therapy techniques, and then another thing that I bring to the table is equine assisted therapy, which is something we can talk about in a little bit. But basically, you’re you’re using visual art, music, rhythm, movement, sometimes storytelling, as we were just talking about. But visual arts, play metaphors-that’s a very big piece of what I do, and and even nature. So, using those to understand what what works for some people, what doesn’t work for some people, and it’s really a way of them communicating their needs to us as clinicians, so that we can help them get to where they need to be.
Lillian Nave 09:01
You’re trying to figure out like what is working for someone to process right something, and I’m thinking about it in that learning lens. It’s like how do we understand what’s going on in UDL? We want to have multiple modes of representation. So whether that means it’s accessible, but also that it’s easy to be perceived, like so, does that mean giving sort of background on a term, right? That maybe you’re coming into a higher level and you don’t know what the background is. So you want to have, you want to design options for perception, which is the top part of the purple column about multiple means of representation, and also support a diversity of perspectives and identity, so if you’re telling a story that has no grounding in their particular culture of reference, that’s not going to help, right? So thinking about other ways that you’re going to do that. So yeah, for some people, an abstract point 123, I’m I’m thinking about intercultural communication right now. Is going to hit the mark much faster than a storytelling circle, but for others, it’s going to be a lot easier to understand and hang their hat on a concept if they can hear a story about it before it’s like point one, point 2.3, Here are these abstract concepts. So it just thinking about everybody’s different. There’s learner variability, and everybody’s going to have a different way into something. And in your case, you’re talking about therapy. You’re talking about processing things and emotions. And you and your colleagues over there in our app state department over there of in the in the College of Education have a lot of different modalities I that I never thought heard of or thought of and I think it’s I think it honors the individual is what I’m getting at and I’m I mean I’m proud to be part of App State because wasn’t it the first to have creative and expressive arts or something like that?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 11:04
It was so. Our program started in 1985 under the leadership of Dr. Sally Atkins, who, though she is retired and professor emeritus, she’s still very involved in the world of creative expressive arts and our university. And yeah, so it was. I it was one of the first few. I would say I feel like it was one of the top five. So excuse me if I’m wrong on that, but I’m pretty certain there were a few other universities that had either. I think there were maybe three that had developed programs, and then there were some that were coming on the scene. But our program started in 1985, so nonetheless, still a very strong and and certainly widely respected program. I’m very proud to be a part of our part of our faculty and program there for sure.
Lillian Nave 11:46
Yeah. So, so with the creative and expressive arts, it’s just another modality, another way to process things to kind of receive information and also to share information. And I can think about ways that I have students like design an infographic, or they might, you know, give a visual representation of just how their brain is working, and that’s the kind of connection I’m seeing in UDL. But I’m, I also, I want to be sure to say I’m not expecting any faculty member to become a counselor or to be a therapist or anything like that. I’m not qualified. I don’t expect other people to be qualified, and this is really interesting to me, and helps flesh out that idea that UDL teaches me, which is that every learner is going to be really touching this elephant, right, from a different spot. Like here’s the tusks, and here here’s the trunk, and here’s the tail, right? And we, if as other people are describing this elephant, it sounds like a completely different beast, but it’s all just different parts. So that’s yeah, that’s the part that’s so interesting to me.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 12:49
To kind of expand on that a little bit, or add a little color to it, if you will. I so so some of the things that we do, we really focus on how so many times we might not be able to explain it because I who was it? I believe it was Gary Landreth, who was a play therapist, who who said something to the effect of, like words are at best just a minimal way of communicating, and you know he he really underscores that piece of this is just the beginning. There’s so many other types of expression of communication, and I don’t mean you know hi. Oh, that person looks at me. Hi, but I mean communication of hurt, of happiness, of of confidence, of being underwhelmed, of being overwhelmed. Of you, you can look at someone and just you know you could just tell if they if they get it, if they don’t get it. I mean, how often are we, as we’re teaching at the university level, scanning our our students and scanning, and we’re we’re looking for we’re looking for affirmations recognition, which might be right. Someone leaning in, someone sitting back in their seat, someone totally checked out. Someone who’s raising their hand. I mean, there’s so many different things. But basically, what we’re looking at is the you know trying to figure out if they can’t explain an experience, can they draw it? Can they move in it? Can they choose a color? Can they recognize it through a different type of response? And and I think so often, people feel restricted to being to to having to communicate it with words, and this just opens up lots of other options. Oh my
Lillian Nave 14:29
gosh, I feel like you’ve just answered that. What was going to be my next question? But is how do creative and expressive arts therapy help some learners that augment talk therapy? And it is it’s all those things-the things that words can’t exactly describe. And I know. Okay, I’m. I’m going to add a little bit here. I know that as faculty members, when we’re teaching a class, we we are using words, and if and that is our primary way of getting at. And communicating this to students, and I think about online courses and best practices. Let’s say for an online course, if you’re going to make a video for your students, it’s better to have even just a little square of you and your face, so that in that video, so students can see your face communicating to them, rather than a voice over PowerPoint. It just it gets a more of a connection, and it’s that humanized part. So I’m thinking about what you just said about other ways that we communicate. So just seeing that human face in there, but then we also have on you know I’m thinking in an online way. If we don’t have students sitting in front of us, you know, what are the ways that we can connect with those students or offer ways that they are able to communicate with us in multicultural ways, in maybe multisensory ways. Like maybe they can make a a visual representation of something and upload that to an LMS. I mean, I’ve it’s I think it’s possible, and I’ve had my students in my completely online classes-they are uploading actual like a photograph of the thing they drew that tells their thinking of a particular theory and things like that. So, but I know you’ve got a lot to say. In fact, you had a whole chapter, I think, in a book that was talking about this. So
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 16:20
I’ve learned. I am taking notes as you’re speaking. One of my little tips. So you mentioned yes, I do have a chapter, and I will be happy to talk about that. And it’s equine assisted therapy. That’s one of the chapters in in our edited book on creative and expressive arts approaches. Well, one of the things I wanted to mention is that when I was in my again story time when I was in undergrad, the classes that I did the best in were the classes that had interpreters in them. I went to a college that had my university had we had a deaf a large deaf ed program, and so there were a lot of deaf students at my school, and so those classes that had deaf students had interpreters in the front of the classroom. So much so, they they were so engaging to watch. And I know that’s not the purpose to be engaging for the rest of us, but they were very engaging. That I had a professor who got upset that we were all watching the interpreter. Well, why do you think that was? It’s not because a professor was unqualified, not interesting. It’s just that we were like, “Oh, that’s the oh, that must be the sign for bridge. Look at that! Oh, look at I mean. And we were actually able to put right visuals with what we were hearing, so we were knocking out two senses right away. And I’ll tell you, those are the classes that I always did much better in. So I was using it’s a multisensory approach, which is really the focus of of my work that I do. It’s very multisensory. I have students. I teach in my equine assisted therapy course. I have my students will be asked to. We call it a brain dump. So when they come to the farm, we realize they’ve had a little bit of a drive to get there, and maybe the traffic was great. Maybe the music was great. Maybe the traffic was terrible. Who knows? We want everybody to start on the same page. So we literally, we we we do call it a brain dump, and we ask everybody to go take their journals for the first 20 minutes and just go sit somewhere on the farm and just write whatever comes into their mind. And our our hope is that they’re able to purge all that they need to? They come back to the circle. This is not something we read. This is theirs. They can burn it. They can throw it away. They can keep it forever. Whatever they’d like to do with it, and we really find that it really balances everybody, brings them back. Well, we do in the evenings. I ask them to do some reflections. Those do get turned into us, and I say one to two pages, one to two pages again, because I recognize some people are very that they really like to process through journaling, and others they just want to process during the day and and do it. So anyway, I’ve always found it interesting. I always each summer that I teach this course, and I teach it twice each summer. I will have students that will put like pest flowers in the book or in their journal, and then they’ll scan that to me, or they will draw a picture of a horse, which I think is always it, or draw a picture of. And and what I’m getting at is, I see that that is their way of saying I can’t put into words what I experienced, and so I’m I’m really trying to give this to you in the best way that I know how, and I 100% accept that. I I love that. I love that students take it upon themselves to say what’s going to work for me, but still meet the criteria of the of the of the grading system. Right.
Lillian Nave 19:39
So they that that makes me think if somebody were and I get this as a UDL person, it’s like well that that is going to change my curriculum or something. No, you just said you don’t change the curriculum. They’re still going to have to write. It’s not like they can send you pressed flowers and that is their final project, right?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 19:57
That does not right.
Lillian Nave 19:58
Yeah, but it allows. It’s allowing for all these kind of other nuanced, augmented ways to kind of add what it meant, or what they learned, or how they learned it. So perhaps part of the learning of what was happening in that counseling session with the equine assisted counseling, and I know you do these in the summer, and they’re like shortened summer courses, and you go to the farm, and all your students are there for like five day intensive,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 20:28
one week intensive. Yes,
Lillian Nave 20:29
and they get a three credit hour grad course. Is it undergrad or grad course? Correct. Yeah, and so you have you have a very defined, well defined rubric about what they have to do, and they have to do a lot during this very intensive course. But you’re also allowing for these other ways to kind of augment or explain a little bit more, perhaps in ways that words aren’t necessarily able to show, like that particular color of blue in the flowers was the the thing that connected into remembering the shade of the eye color of a person or or something you know and then they can say here’s here’s that you know here’s an actual flower that I picked that was the thing that was meaningful or that actually was like the keystone that put these things together for me, and so here’s a relic of that, or here’s something that helped me to put these things together. Anyway, if you would have told me that in college, and or if I had been asked to do that, I would have scoffed and thought this is not academia at all. But I have grown since then. Me too.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 21:39
Me too. I am the biggest. I am the biggest critic of the work that I do. Going back to people telling me play therapy is a thing, and in my mind, I’m going. That is some racket that somebody has come up with to make money to just play those toys. And then I learned more about, and which was really my. That was my push to say, you know what, Jill, lean in when you have questions about things. Lean in, don’t lean away. And so the same thing with equine therapy. I I was pushed very hard by a friend, and I thought, oh my gosh, okay, fine, I’ll go to this train. Just, but but then we’re done. We’re done discussing it after this. And I’m probably one of the most vocal advocates for this type of work and it just reaches populations that really don’t typically have overwhelming success with traditional approaches to counseling
Lillian Nave 22:31
talk therapy.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 22:32
So, right. Well, yeah, that’s actually what I was going to say. I I did want to tell you. I again story time. I have I do have a little story for you. One of the children that we work with at the farm. So let me just explain, if I may, because I haven’t really talked a lot about the equine therapy. But basically, we we partner with horses because the idea is that horses are they are prey, and so because they are prey, they’re very highly attuned to what’s going on in their environment, and so when someone approaches them, the horse is always wondering, “Am I safe or not safe? And and due to that response, it’s immediate biofeedback to how we are. And if I go in and I go, “Hey, good morning, everybody, and the horses startle a little bit. That lets what? What does that show? That shows that my energy is very different from the horse’s energy, and so it reminds me that maybe I don’t need to go in with such high energy. Maybe I need to take a moment to assess what’s going on, the environment, the energy in the environment. So we work with, in fact, today it’s Wednesday, and I just got that from the farm today. We work with children ages K through 12. The program it’s called day treatment, which basically it’s children who are not quite able to be in public schools in a typical public school setting, but the severity of their situation also doesn’t doesn’t have them on a like an adjudicated youth program or or such. So really, it’s a it’s a program that fosters the mental health components first, and then the educational piece, right? Because we have to have them to be able to handle their situations, and then they can take in educational pieces, right? The academic pieces. So we have these children. They, like I said, K 12 kindergarten all the way through 12th grade is about two weeks ago. We had this one little guy who comes, and he’s very quiet. He sits in the he stands in the back because we always have to stand before we go inside the barn to get ready, and and we always have them do some horse breaths to kind of relax. That’s one of our fun little things that we do. And this little guy was working on something. So threads, little little looks like he was creating something. He had been working on it for quite a while, and
Lillian Nave 24:56
so he was
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 24:56
he he does not talk much. He
Lillian Nave 24:58
was using his hands. He was using. Thing in his hands is what you’re saying. Yes. Okay.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 25:02
Yes.
Lillian Nave 25:02
Because nobody can see what you just did, which is like putting both of your hands together and fiddling with something. Got it.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 25:08
You’re missing half the show if you can’t see my hands. You know. My apologies. So yes, he was fiddling with his hands as I am now, and doing some knots and twirling and twisting and whatnot did not pick his head up. Didn’t pick his head up for the first 15 minutes. The week before we had worked, his particular group had been there. The week before, he spent time with interestingly our quietest horse, our horse, our little guy, little little dark horse who’s just very very sweet, and sometimes gets a little bullied by the other horses, but anyway, so he spent some time with him. I just thought that was unusual. I thought it was unusual, but I was like, you know what? Maybe he needs some time. Now again, this little guy doesn’t talk much at all. Anyway, we don’t get a whole lot out of him, but you know what? He’s showing me that he enjoys the time with the horses because he comes in the barn. He’s dressed appropriately every week that he comes. These are all of those telltale things. He doesn’t have to tell me I am ready to go, but I see that he’s ready to go. He’s lined up on the gate when we tell people to line up. He comes in and then he grabs his tools and he’ll go over to work with the horses. All that to say, those were all indicators that this has been a positive experience, even though he’s never said a word to me. He did come up to the the my barn partner and gave her something and asked, “May I put this on Sunshine, which is one of the horses? And again, I have to show you. I mean, I’m sorry, but you can see in this picture that I will put in the
Lillian Nave 26:40
resource section of our of our podcast. I will make
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 26:44
sure.
Lillian Nave 26:45
Yeah,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 26:46
I will make sure this picture is there, and you can see right here is that little bracelet. He was working on that little bracelet all week to give to his favorite horse, and I just thought, and he tied that
Lillian Nave 26:58
into the mane, the braid in the mane by the horse,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 27:01
he did. He braided it into the mane of the horse, and again, no other words were shared, no other stories, no other descriptions. Went back, kept doing you know horse tasks that he was asked to do or what what he wanted to do. There’s so much material in that experience of what he just did, and no words were exchanged except the you know, do I have permission to do this? And I think sometimes that the creative work can be purposeful. It can be it can it can be clinically grounded, and we can document that. I can document that that there was growth, there was relationship building there. Lots of lots of things were happening there, but it was all very nontraditional, and so that that’s a little bit about the the equine assisted work that I do.
Lillian Nave 27:51
That’s awesome. You’ve already answered this like so many ways that that creative or expressive. There he was expressing his care or love or understanding or connection in a way that was totally without words, and and then you trained your students, the grad students, the counselors to kind of see that and kind of look for these things, and that can be written up in a report later or whatever, or we can see there’s movement in the the student or in the the person, the client as they move forward or or through therapy. And I know, I mean, it can be used. I know a lot with trauma, a lot with oh gosh, in resettlement for veterans, yeah, veterans resettlement for refugees, yeah, so much with refugees, and I know you partner. We talk about this a lot. Is our international work, and you partner with a colleague that you co-wrote a chapter with in Greece, and in I know in Athens we have a huge amount of North African refugees and Middle Eastern refugees coming into Greece because that’s the closest European port, you know, or way that all of these refugees can come in, and and you know, working in in ways that also, I guess, sidestep the language barrier too. If you’ve got right people speaking different languages,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 29:18
yes, and I and I think about I think about that because I do speak with my colleague in in Greece, Dr. Sachs, and she and I often talk about the refugee populations at the school that she is, you know, commissioned to work with. And there are some things that are universal. Play is universal. Play is universal, and I think if someone were to sit down with me after I had just come through what what arguably would be a traumatic experience or a heavy experience or just moving, right? If you’re just moving, that’s a big experience. And so if someone were to sit down with me and say, “So let’s talk about what that was like.” No, I don’t want to talk about it. Give me some clay. I want to pound some clay, or give me some toys. Give me if I’m a child. I mean, there’s I mean there’s certain things to do in the play therapy realm for adults as well. But I just think about so much. I want. I also want listeners to think about this. How many times does somebody leave you a voicemail and you go, oh, that’s a lot of extra steps. If they had just texted me, I would have been able to have it right there. But now that it’s on voicemail, I have to go into my voicemail. I have to right. You have to, and then I have to maybe take some notes. And then where am I going to put my notes? Anyway, so I just want to I want to point that out. That sometimes, sometimes communicating verbally can be really tiring and exhausting. So there are different ways of of building relationships, and as I said, play is universal. And and I also think about one other thing with my equine assisted therapy work is so often we’re in more of a rural area, and so often we are told, “Hey, this is the thing the big cities are doing. This is what we want you to do. And I love the idea. I have friends in you know, as we are in North Carolina, I have friends in Raleigh and in the Charlotte area saying, “Hey, how do we get one of those horse programs started by us? And I go well. It’s actually, and it’s so fitting for us in a rural community. And I and I really like that. I like that we have something that didn’t necessarily start in a big city, so to speak. And we have to modify it in our rural community to to kind of make it work, to kind of make shift, you know, this is a very organic thing for our particular area, and I really love that. And it can also be done in cities as well. Oh yeah, but yeah, it can be done in lots of places. But I do like that it’s a very, it’s much more of a natural thing here
Speaker 1 31:54
as well.
Lillian Nave 31:55
Well, and it is, it’s complicated because I know the farm. You have to go about 30 minutes to get to the farm from where you live, which is an hour away from our campus, and so the reason why you have to do these short intensives is because the farm that you partner with that has the availability and also wants to do this is an hour away. So our students have to then come for five or six days and either you know spend the whole day or this intensive nine to five for the four or five days. I know you have like a full day in class or something on a campus, and then you’ve got the days at the farm. So I know sometimes I think one time didn’t they get an Airbnb and a bunch of students just oh my gosh for that so funny so I mean they they called
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 32:39
it horse camp and I love that. I love that they called my class horse camp, and at the same time, I’m like, can we make sure it’s the academic pieces to focus? So, but they had fun making spaghetti, and yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But I will say, and and even choosing the farm that I partnered with, I the the farm owner that I partner with, she has a background in special education. Okay, she is an educator. She is also a former school administrator, so she understands student learning outcomes. She understands objectives. So it’s not just oh hey, I found a farm with pretty horses, but I found someone who is also I am what we call eGala trained, which is Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. It’s a mouthful to say that we’ve both been through this very specific training program. While there’s other programs out there, that just happens to be the one that we’re both trained in, and we do have objectives and and learning outcomes. So again, it’s not just come and and you know pet a horse and braid a mane. There’s a lot of activities that we do, and there’s a lot of farms near our campus. But I choose not to partner with them because sometimes it’s a it’s accessibility. Yeah. Sometimes the farms do not have accessibility taken care of. So those are definitely things that I try to try to be mindful of.
Lillian Nave 33:56
Yeah. I love how you’re building knowledge for the students, you’re also building it for the person who’s owning the farm, for our university, for other universities. That’s definitely one of our UDL guidelines or considerations. Is and thinking about how we’re going to connect prior knowledge to new learning. And every time you’re having these interactions that you tell me about, and I’m like, oh, I never would have thought that I don’t make those connections because I’m not trained like you are, right? And you’re seeing how you’re using these interactions to help not just the students, like the clients that you serve when you’re there every Wednesday, but also when you’re teaching grad students, you’re teaching future counselors, and these interactions you’re helping them to make that connection between okay, here’s the theory we learned about, here’s whatever theory it is, you know, attachment or whatever, and then you’re saying okay, what did they do in the ring with the horse? What did they do the first time? What. They do the second day. What do they do the third day? You know, and making those connections, and it’s a very tactile, very experiential learning. That I don’t know if you could do it without going to the farm. Like, could you even have a really powerful? It wouldn’t be as powerful. I would just have to say as as what you do, but like I don’t know if you can do all of this in a classroom and a video of a and a video of a horse rather than experience it yourself, right?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 35:32
Right, and that’s exactly when my my partner at the farm and I when we talk about our work because there are times when we’re talking to the people we’re working with, right? Even this morning, I talked to a couple of the the children about different things that were going on. But if we realize, if we start to see that we’re doing more talking than having them work with the horses, then why are we there, right? Then why are we even bringing the horses into this work? So we always try to bring it back to the relationship the children have with the horse. Funny enough, the kids often forget that we’re there, and they kind of come up with their own activities and whatnot. But it’s exactly that point that we, you know, we have to continually reassess. You know, how are we making sure we’re using the resources that we have, and is it necessary to? And we say yes every time. Every time we’re there doing this work with the horses. You know the thing is, I could teach the same lessons. I could teach the lessons on relationships, but the difference is, as a human, I do get frustrated when people don’t show up on time, or I do get frustrated that a that somebody maybe didn’t pay, or maybe a parent didn’t show up for a meeting. But horses don’t. They don’t. They don’t care. They’re ready to work when you’re there, and they’re ready to stop when you leave. You know, they’re ready to stop. When I say stop, stop working. You know, for for the hour or whatever the time length is that we’re working with them. But they they don’t they don’t hold grudges. They’re much better they’re much better creatures than we are as humans. They you know they don’t have biases, and sometimes we come in and we go. We kind of have this like, you know, like this other little stuff, just kind of the stuff that bothers us. Maybe, maybe I didn’t have a great phone call before I came into the phone. Well, and I’m not totally regulated. Horses, they’re moment to moment creature, and that’s that’s what the difference is. And as you said, you you can’t really do this work without the horse, and it’s not going to work with the video of the
Lillian Nave 37:25
horse. Yeah,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 37:26
you know, I mean, videos, of course, are nice and lovely, but yeah,
Lillian Nave 37:29
yeah. I mean, you could explore the concepts. I mean, yes, not everybody’s going to have a horse, right? You’re not going to be able to do that. So I suppose there are definitely ways to do it, but the that experiential education is, to me, is very connected to the considerations for universal design for learning, like in the multiple means of representation. Like if you’re there in a session and you’re telling, you’re directing these graduate students about what to be looking for or what is happening. You’re able to take an interaction and highlight right there the the patterns that that happened or the critical features, which is totally one of the UDL guidelines about building knowledge is to highlight and explore patterns and critical features and big ideas and relationships, and you’re like, oh, here’s you see what happened just there. I’m gonna bring it back to what we did in the classroom, and you’re already cultivating multiple ways of meaning and ways of knowing in in adding this experiential part. So that’s so much to me is that transfer and relevance? Students are really invested. Oh my gosh, they’re having so much fun in this class, but it’s so instructive. It’s so deep, and they’re they come out as believers. You know, just like I was skeptical, you were skeptical, and then they’ll come out and say that’s exactly you know how it happened, or that I could see this progress, because they felt it. They were there. They saw. They were not just seeing it. They were a part of it to know it. And you’re making those connections throughout the the whole class.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 39:11
Well, and I’ll also tell you that every every time there’s there’s a couple of things that show up, and I go, I don’t know if I can share this because people really won’t think I’m serious, or they’ll think I’ve embellished it. And and sure enough, I don’t I don’t have to hold on to the stories because new stories happen every time I’m at the farm. Every time I’m at the farm, but and and while they might not be like whoa, this is magic, but there will be example today. We had a horse who was, you know, you could see the white of the horse’s eyes when the kids came in because I think she was just really relaxed, and all of a sudden went rah! All these kids come in, you know, and it was a group of middle school kids, and they bring a lot of energy with them. And we had her basically posted up to the wall and ready to be groomed and. Her head was up, her ears were, you know, turned out, and then every once in a while they’d go back a little bit. Well, these are all indicators that she is very alert. She is not relaxed. Okay, and so I gave one of the students the objective. I said, you know what? I’d like you to do. I’d like you to go over to her, and I would like you to see what you can do because knowing that this child already has some skills because they come each week. I want to see what you can do about trying to get her to relax a little bit. Let’s see if you can. And so it was the student’s job to listen to the horse, and in listening to the horse, she was grooming her, you know, grooming from her hip, excuse me, her shoulder down to her hip. Okay, so just brushing the horse, and then she also she noticed that she touched the withers of the horse, and the horse shook a little bit. You know that perniculous muscle horses have, and just started to shake, and that scared her, scared the student, and then the horse pulled its head. But anyway, it was a whole chain reaction, and so we processed like what was going on there, what happened, and how do we avoid that in the future? And what did that tell you? Okay, because you listened, it told you something. Okay, so it told you to maybe go in a little more gently. So it’s really teaching some of these children some skills that they otherwise haven’t really necessarily learned how to develop, and really stretch out that that that piece between thinking and doing a little bit, which they they that this particular group struggles with a little bit.
Lillian Nave 41:27
Yeah, I love that stretching out that piece between thinking and doing, and I just love thinking about all of the different ways that we can learn that it’s not always just the write a discussion post, right, or all the the very usual or traditional ways of demonstrating one’s learning or being taught. So I think the experiential part is so helpful,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 41:59
right? And and that that you know the question that often comes in my mind, which is exactly what you’re saying, is what pathway might help the student connect with the material? Yeah, what pathway might help the student connect with the objective? How much can I do to get this to really stick? Because we could all do presentations, we could do slide decks, we could do all the things, and put it 100% on the students, and you and I both know that we’re going to have a lot of students that fall through the cracks because that doesn’t always work. But if we can give them something to hold on to, that’s going to be very, very different. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 42:34
Earlier this year, I talked with in one of the other episodes, we talked about conversational quizzes with Megan Donnelly, and a lot of people picked up on that, which was just a new way to think about assessment. Where you’re just talking, really, you’re just talking with a friend. Like, what are the main points of this reading or something? Anyway, it was just a different way to think about that process of showing what you know, explaining what you know, rather than writing it down, this is just another multiple means type of conversation. But you have very interesting and counselor-specific ways to do it that I think are worth exploring. And you know, we haven’t talked too much about your play therapy, what you do with play therapy. So, and I know you do some intensives with that, where you actually get you know younger students in, and they’re playing, and you’re directing graduate students on what to look for in play therapy. And I was just wondering if you could tell a little bit more about how play therapy would help clients, and also your students, and in kind of connecting what they’re learning clinically into how they can be better counselors, like better outcomes for them as students.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 43:50
Yeah, play therapy. I first want to clear up any misconception. You know, it’s not connect for. I think a lot of people have that image in their minds, but there is playing in therapy, like playing in the therapy session or play in the therapy session, and then there’s play therapy, which is a very specific approach to therapy. Okay. So play therapy, and there’s even different modalities of play therapy. There’s directive and non-directive. So directive being, I’m going to say, okay, so we’re going to take all of these stuffed animals here, and I want you to choose a stuffed animal for each member of your family. And I’ll tell you, Beanie Babies are the best for this because people our age have millions of them. And anyway, if you’re in the states, it’s a it was a popular thing. But I have I have the best beanies. I have a crab. I have a turkey. I have a little I have a little black cat. I have a puppy. I have it. We all have people in our families that have those personalities, right? And the children will come. The other piece that I like about those animals is that it there’s not a sense of oh none of these look like me
Lillian Nave 45:08
yeah
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 45:08
right because I’m going with characteristics I’m not going with a skin tone or a particular cultural background I’m looking at personality traits and personality traits can be pretty universal right so everybody’s got a turkey in their family, you know. Everybody’s got an octopus in their family, but anyway, so that’s so that would be a very directive approach. But then there’s what I teach my students because I feel like it is very foundational is non-directive play therapy or what we call child-centered play therapy. So my course that I teach it’s a three-week course in our summer in the in the summer, and I have what I call a micro practicum, which is where I bring children in, children from anywhere from I say a pretty verbal two year old up through maybe nine or 10 years old, and we have a we have a lab in our department, and so we have six class or six excuse me six lab rooms, and then an observation room. And we have after my students have been trained, each lab room has a variety of toys set up in them. And the difference again, this is you know pull me out of the weeds if I go too far, but essentially in non-directive play therapy, we have three categories of toys. We have aggressive release toys, we have creative and expressive toys, or or fantasy, which would be like fairy wands and maybe glitter if you’re that brave to have that in your in your office. You know, play doh, like construction paper and and and such markers, paints, whatever, and then the first one, aggressive release, is going to be you might have alligators and little rubber snakes, but you also have a much to what people are much to the contrary of what people. It’s really most play therapists are really okay with the aggressive release toys. I think some people find some people who aren’t familiar with play therapy find it a little alarming, right? So when we say knives, ropes, okay, we’re talking like rubber knives, right? Or like a little Nerf gun, things like that, right? Then the last category is going to be realistic toys and nurturing toys, so baby bottle, maybe you know a hammer and a little playset, you know tool set, whatever, and and things from home, and you just let the child play. The counselor’s focus is to do is to is to observe the child’s play, and also let the child know that they are engaging with them, and it’s a very specific approach of doing it. So we’re not saying, “Oh, all right, I’m going to grab these little army people, and I’m going to use them to. No, you’re going to watch them do it, and you’re going to pull out themes that you notice. You’re going to pull out patterns that you see. Oh, you found all of those. Oh, I see. You’re digging a hole in that sand over there, or you’re digging a hole over there. That’s how we’re going to let the children know that we are with them because the relationship in counseling, 80% of the work is done in the relationship with the client and the counselor, so that’s the gist of play therapy. I will say, coming back to some of the aggressive release toys, it’s so interesting because you know when children pick up a a rubber knife and people go, “Oh my gosh, see, I know there’s such a bad kid, and the truth is that’s not it at all. All that shows is that the child is is embracing power and control, and you know what? We all like that. We all have a desire for power and control in certain environments, and we are providing an environment in which that is a very very safe environment for them to explore those toys. So it’s a it’s a really, really neat thing, and it and it’s incredibly effective. So, at the end of my three weeks, I bring in children from the community, and every year they ask to come back. It’s so funny to me. I have one little girl who’s been coming back for like the last four years, and she keeps asking her mom, “When do I get to teach the college students? So that’s my favorite compliment. That’s
Lillian Nave 49:19
awesome. Yeah. So yeah, just volunteers. You send out a call, and every year there’s lots of folks that’ll bring their kids to help our students learn, and that’s fantastic. So I gosh, there’s there’s just so many parts of this conversation that that I love, and we, you and I, Jill, could talk for hours and hours and hours, but I’m trying to wrap it up in just saying how, what can we learn from this? What I’ll say already, it makes me think about observing my own students too, about what happens if something goes wrong, and we do this all the time. Like if I’m teaching an in-person class and the. Discussion is not happening, and you know I’ll say, okay, I need to flip that. We need to go some sort of anonymous polling, right? And then people might open up and they’ll start talking more and and be able to switch and and allow for more open discussion. Just I need to kind of read it, read the room in in some way, but how how do you integrate this into your college teaching, or knowing all the things you know, all the different ways that you get at learning through equine assisted therapy, or through through the play therapy, through all of these different ways? You have such an empathetic lens for your students, I’m just wondering. Again, we are not. I am not as a faculty member a therapist. I am not a counselor. I’m not advocating that any of us should be either. But yeah, what is the the connection? I think that we can take in knowing you know all of our learners are different, and people learn in such a variety of ways, and you seem to know a lot about this subset of of ways, like through counseling. What has it taught you about integrating that into your year long teaching in the as the director of the counseling program?
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 51:18
I go back to that question: What pathway might help these students connect with the material. That is, that’s a big one for me. And the pathway isn’t always just-is there a rubric or is there a-you know what? What do what do I what book do I use this week? Sometimes the pathway is okay. We’re going to go outside for the next 20 minutes, and we literally change the environment, which is which is really a grounding practice in expressive arts, in the expressive arts therapy approach and counseling. But changing the environment or really upending things, because what I find is that students come in, especially if they have back to back classes, and and especially if they’re just sitting in the same classroom for six hours, that’s a toughie. So then I will say, okay, what do we need to do to switch it up? Or I might do a game that has nothing to do with the class.
Lillian Nave 52:12
Yeah,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 52:12
I’ll do a game, or I’ll have an intentional discussion starter that I know is is one that I again, it’s metaphors. You know, what animal do you feel like you are now in your counseling in your in your progress as as a counselor? Now that those are my students, but other people who are listening, what are your students? What are they working towards? The animal that I am as a as a I don’t know as a the animal that I am as an eighth grader, the beginning of eighth grade versus how I want to be at the end of eighth grade. Yeah, okay. I mean that’s and I and I have little animal cards that I that I spread on the floor. And again, I get kinesthetic with with them. I have them come over. I have them get on the floor. I have them look for the cards, look at the different ones. I mean, I can certainly say everybody choose an animal, but seeing them walking around and engaging with each other, or two people going for the same card, and you know, even just those pieces, I think are so so helpful. But I think really, what is going to help my students connect? And I know we’re running out of time here, but I do have, and I’ll give this to you to post, but it is the expressive therapies continuum, which has so much to do with. And I actually have a little chart where the connection each of these parts of the continuum connect with UDL. So I have like kinesthetic and sensory, which for expressive arts would be movement, touch, rhythm, sensory experiences, and then you know, with UDL, it would be means of multiple engagement and action, and then the perceptual and affective, which is images and patterns and relationships, emotions, and that would also be engagement and representation. Oh, I should have. I should have. No, no, no. You got it. Yeah, and then, and then, cognitive and symbolic. So, language, meaning, analysis, metaphors would be. Yeah. Should I test doing representation?
Lillian Nave 54:13
Yeah, yeah.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 54:14
Expression. Yeah. So, anyway, but I’ll be happy to share that with you. But yeah, there’s such a complete intertwining, and and you’ve mentioned a few times, like the the empathic piece, the empathy piece, is is strong. But I think in order to to really be able to meet your your students’ needs, you have to think about what is it that they need, and what is it that’s missing, or what is it that I could be doing differently, and that’s that’s what I often try to bring. You know, what is it that I could do differently for this particular situation? Yeah,
Lillian Nave 54:48
and and I I’ll be clear too. It’s not learning styles. We know that is a myth. That there’s there’s not.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 54:57
Did I say learning? You never
Lillian Nave 54:58
did, but whatever. I hear that word kinesthetic. I’m like, oh, that’s the one that always that always connects me to that. But you never, no, you never said learning styles. We’re not even talking about that. No, because that is a myth. And but that there are there’s just different pathways. Like what are what are the ways that might that students might connect? And everybody’s going to be different. It’s it is how are we able to engage our students, and we can’t be the end all be all as a faculty member for everybody. But it’s also a thing that I say often, which is we don’t want the same students uncomfortable all of the time, but every student should be uncomfortable some of the time that they’re trying something different. That’s a different kind of assessment. It’s a different way of of learning, so that it’s offering these available pathways, you know, and try something new because it’s in that little uncomfortability that they’re learning, they’re reaching, they’re moving into something new, that kind of thing, and those connections, when I see, I’m looking at the expressive therapies continuum that you sent me that has kind of at the top creative and links this left hemisphere with the right hemisphere. Right. Yeah. That that cognitive and symbolic understanding. We are the ones, as a faculty member, we’re trying to create help those students create that connection. So whichever way we can help them, or offer ways that they can choose, what is the way that that’s going to work for them? So I could say, all right, here we’ve learned about this thing in a variety of ways. We did we did a walkthrough. We did an experiment. We did a lecture. You watched a video, whatever. And then, how can you tell me what you learned? You can tell me in a number of ways. Write me down. Create an infograph. Write down, you know, several paragraphs, an infographic, or maybe some other sort of expressive way that you can tell, but again, it would all be the same rubric. It’s not “Don’t hand me a bunch of pressed flowers. You’d need to explain what that is.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 57:12
Well, and I, if I may, one of my favorite assignments that I have been doing since the beginning of time. I teach child and adolescent counseling, and I ask all of my students. I teach the different developmental levels through Erikson, Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. You know, just a variety of Piaget. Okay, and then I tell my students you have two weeks, and it usually works out because it’s usually like Labor Day, so they have that that week off because I teach on Mondays anyway. So they have a couple of weeks to go home and collect whatever they need to collect, or have you know grandma send it or whatever. But I ask them choose an event in your life that was very impacted by what you now know is a developmental growth point. So, example Eric Erickson, you have you know trust versus mistrust, which is the very first stage, and then I have you know students. So basically, what they have to do is say you know I used to can peaches with my grandma, and I had one student that they actually she brought in a jar actually she brought in a jar of peaches and it was just so lovely. Her grandma grandmother had passed away years before, and she keeps this jar of peaches. And it was the experience that she had with her because that’s when her grandmother was very honest with her about, you know, honey, someday I’m not going to be here. And and and it was also at a point where she was learning the finality of death. It wasn’t just a, you know, oh well, grandma, grandma’s gone, quote unquote. But she was recognized. She she was learning that people people die, and it’s a permanent thing. And so that was you know. So while you look at the peaches and you go, this reminds you of death. No, it doesn’t remind you of death. But it reminds you of that conversation that was so pivotal for you. And then one of my other students, she had an imaginary friend, and she did a slideshow, and she had us in tears. We were laughing so hard, and our stomachs were hurting because her mother would take pictures of she and her imaginary friend at the pool, at the playground, and at the dinner table. They had a play setting for the imaginary front, and it was just so cute because these were all pictures of my student, right? Just just my student with a blank space off to the left or off to the right, and God bless this mother, she she went along with it because she recognized this was developmentally appropriate for a six year old, you know. And I thought it was really really neat, and and so she did she did a really nice job in in in doing the slideshow, and it was very cute. And then she also told us, you know, when when it was time for the imaginary friend to go, and it was a beautiful synopsis of showing us that she understood child development, and that that’s why I that’s way better than an A B a multiple choice test any day.
Lillian Nave 1:00:00
Absolutely, and
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:00:00
we learn so much about all of my students. It’s wonderful.
Lillian Nave 1:00:04
Oh my gosh, what a great assessment! Yeah, a way for those students to explain in a very personal way, in a very engaging way, what they had learned in the class. Amazing! Oh, I love it.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:00:17
Not all, not all happy stories.
Lillian Nave 1:00:20
Yeah,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:00:21
but some very, very sobering, and I think it gives the students a very well-rounded picture of the depth of humanity in the classroom. But it also helps reinforce with every student that speaks reinforces the different developmental stages and and really why those are important to to learn. That it’s not just something on making them learn for their their licensing exam later on, but it’s really really important. So that’s
Lillian Nave 1:00:46
great.
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:00:46
Anyway, oh, I love it. My story time.
Lillian Nave 1:00:48
Well, thank you. Gosh, thank you for all of the stories today, Jill. Those were really I’ve
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:00:53
got more very
Lillian Nave 1:00:53
instructive. We could record every week. Honestly, you and I could. I’m sure. But thank you so much. I won’t take any more of your time, and I appreciate your openness and willingness also to let us in a peek and see what you’re doing with, especially with equine assisted therapy and play therapy, and how I think how I’ve learned a lot too about how we are as humans, how we learn and how we process things, and that I can open my classes up to a lot of ways for my students to to explain what they know. So thank you, thanks for being on the podcast. Yes,
Jill Weidknecht Van Horne 1:01:32
I have really enjoyed doing this, and I really enjoy listening to your podcast. So I don’t know that I’m going to spend a lot of time listening to this particular one per se, you know, listening to yourself talk. But I do, I do enjoy listening to the podcast and learn so much from the variety of folks that you have on here. So I’m glad to be one of them. Thank you.
Lillian Nave 1:01:51
Thank you. Thanks, Jill. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Blue Sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website, thinkud.org. The music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey Quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with 2d’s, by the way. Comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell, and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast. And if you call it App-a-LAY-shun, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host, Lillian Nave. Thanks for listening to the Think UDL podcast.