ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the use of arts-based experiences to express and move through trauma. Autoethnography provides the avenue for sharing the author's multiple traumas, describing being a long-distance caregiver for three immediate family members during struggles with cancer, resulting in their deaths.
The author utilized found poetry as an arts-based means to move toward healing, using journal entries as the source for the poetry. The poems are presented in the chapter, as well as discussion concerning how trauma might result in multiple wounds, the unmet needs of caregivers, exploring trauma through the arts, and the role of music education. An emergent process theorizes a way in which music education faculty might move with their students into musical self-expressions, inviting them to wrestle through their individual and collective traumas through multiple experiences: adding movement to an already composed piece selected by the students; creating cover versions of pieces that resonate with them, based on emergent themes; experimenting with found poetry as an entrance into writing their own lyrics; or creating group compositions based on work created and shared in the classroom.
