Creating a safe space during classroom-based sandplay workshops for immigrant and refugee preschool children

ABSTRACT

Schools must address immigrant and refugee children’s specific needs to enhance their psychosocial development. While most existing programs focusing on children’s emotional and developmental needs assume that they have a basic knowledge of the language of schooling, less verbal interventions, especially sandplay, provide other promising avenues. This article describes a classroom-based sandplay intervention with immigrant and refugee preschool children in Canada, involving teachers. Based on individual and class-level observations, we examine the creation of emotional safety during the workshops and teachers’ role in its development, focusing on the process of two children from Syria. Analyses suggest that teachers provided a safe-enough space that allowed children to express, during the workshops, emotions related to their life experiences. While implementing sandplay in non-clinical settings with non-art-therapists involves challenges, offering sandplay workshops in classrooms should be considered as a valid avenue of intervention to support the social adjustment of immigrant and refugee children.

KEYWORDS:

• Sandplay
• preschool
• safe space
• teachers
• immigrant
• refugee
• children
• creativity in counseling

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to warmly thank the workshop facilitators who did such a great job supporting children and teachers: Marie-Eve Caron, Catherine Isely, Priscilla Monette-Gagné and Maïté Simard. And also many thanks to the children who shared their stories with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fondation de l’Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (FUQAT) under [Grant 2017-2018].