Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned grew out of years of practice working with children in schools and hospitals—often without a map. I did not begin this work as an educator or healthcare professional, but as an artist sharing my own creative process. Over time, experience led to questions, and questions led to learning.

This essay reflects that evolution. It gathers insights shaped through observation, trust, and responsibility to the children I worked alongside. It is not a set of conclusions, but a record of learning still in motion.

Reflections on Art, Care, and Social Infrastructure

I am an artist, not someone who set out to work in education or healthcare.

My work with children began almost by accident—through schools first, and later through hospitals. I arrived not with a pedagogy, a curriculum, or a theory, but with my own creative process and a willingness to share what I knew.

When I began working with children, I could only teach from experience. I guided them using my personal relationship to making—how I approached uncertainty, how I stayed with a process, how I trusted intuition when there were no clear answers. What I offered was not expertise, but presence and practice.

As the projects evolved, so did my need to understand what I was witnessing. Experience led me to questions, and questions led me to learning. I began to seek language, frameworks, and research—not to replace intuition, but to better understand it. The work shaped my learning as much as my learning shaped the work.

Over time, this path led me into children’s hospitals—spaces where people are often reduced to roles: patient, provider, beneficiary. These are places built for care, yet shaped by urgency, protocol, and efficiency—places where healing is pursued with extraordinary skill, and where something essential can quietly disappear.

What follows are not conclusions, but lessons learned—slowly, and sometimes reluctantly—through lived experience.

Lesson One: Environment Is Not Neutral

I used to think of environment as a backdrop. Walls, lighting, sound—secondary elements to the “real work” of care or education. I no longer believe that.

In children’s hospitals, I have seen how intentional quiet can calm a body before any intervention begins. How the absence of alarms allows breath to settle. How light, space, and pacing communicate safety long before words are exchanged.

Healing does not happen only through treatment. It also happens through atmosphere. Environment teaches the nervous system what to expect. When a space signals calm, dignity, and attention, the body responds. Art, in this context, is not decoration—it is part of the architecture of care.

Lesson Two: Seeing Comes Before Understanding

One of the practices that stayed with me—long before my work in hospitals—is See, Think, Wonder, a simple yet powerful guide I encountered during my art education and later saw reflected in the work of educators such as Jessica Ross.

The practice asks us to pause:

• What do I see?

• What do I think?

• What do I wonder?

In care settings, this order matters. Too often we rush to interpretation or solution. See, Think, Wonder invites restraint. It asks us to witness before we explain, to remain curious rather than conclusive.

I have found this approach essential when working with children. Before assuming meaning, I watch how they hold a marker, where they pause, what they return to. I wonder what they are navigating—not to decode it, but to honor it. This practice allows children to remain authors of their own experience, rather than subjects of our interpretation.

Looking back, I realize that I did not arrive at this work through a formal teaching pathway. I arrived through making, through trust, and through responsibility to the children in front of me. I taught what I knew, and when what I knew was no longer enough, I learned more.

Lesson Three: Agency Matters More Than Outcome

Art programs are often evaluated by what they produce: finished pieces, measurable outcomes, visible success. But in care settings, outcome is rarely the point.

What matters is agency.

When children are invited to make art, they are not being distracted. They are being asked to decide: which color, which shape, when to stop. In environments where so much is decided for them, this matters deeply.

I have watched children work slowly, deliberately, without instruction. I have seen urgency appear not as anxiety, but as clarity—an inner knowing of what wants to be expressed. In those moments, children are no longer defined by diagnosis or chart. They are makers. That shift, however temporary, is not symbolic. It is structural.

Lesson Four: Learning Is Slow—Like Cooking

In art school, we did not have a name for it. There was no formal framework attached to the way we learned. But looking back, what we were practicing was a kind of slow cooking—a way of developing through time, repetition, and sustained attention to our own creative process.

We learned by returning to the same questions again and again. By sitting with uncertainty. By allowing work to evolve rather than forcing resolution. Growth did not arrive through quick results, but through patience—through staying with a process long enough for it to change us.

Years later, while trying to better understand how art is taught and learned, I encountered the work of Shari Tishman, particularly her writing on slow looking and slow thinking. Her language gave shape to something I had experienced intuitively long before: that meaningful learning unfolds gradually, through attention, revisiting, and reflection.

Care environments often resist this pace. They are designed for efficiency, rapid decision-making, and measurable progress. But art does not thrive there. Neither does learning.

In hospitals, I have watched children return to the same drawing again and again—adding, erasing, revising. Nothing about this process is immediate. And yet, something is always happening. Meaning is forming quietly, below the surface.

Learning, like slow cooking, asks us to trust that what cannot yet be seen is still transforming.

Lesson Five: Will Reveals Itself in Unexpected Places

Being in children’s hospitals made something else visible to me—something I had encountered before only through philosophy.

During my studies, I read Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his writing on the will as a fundamental force—an impulse toward continuation, becoming, and existence itself. At the time, his ideas felt abstract. I understood them intellectually, but not viscerally.

In hospital settings, that changed.

I began to recognize the will not as something spoken, but as something enacted quietly—through attention, through effort, through the decision to pick up a marker, to add one more line, to keep shaping an image even when the body is tired. The will to live, to continue, to transform did not announce itself heroically. It appeared in small gestures, in persistence without spectacle.

Witnessing this gave Schopenhauer’s thinking weight and relevance in a way no classroom ever had. His ideas stopped being theoretical and became something lived—present in the room. Art, I realized, does not create this will. It reveals it.

Lesson Six: Finding and Losing the Self Through Art

There is a line by Thomas Merton that has stayed with me for years: Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

For a long time, I believed this applied only to my own experience as an artist—to the way time dissolves in the act of making, how self-consciousness fades, how something truer can emerge when control loosens.

Watching children create reshaped that understanding. As they worked, they became deeply absorbed—fully present, yet free from the identities imposed on them elsewhere. In those moments, they were not patients, not defined by circumstance. They were simply inside the act of making.

Art allowed them to find themselves through choice and intention, while also losing themselves in focus, imagination, and flow. What I once understood as a solitary truth revealed itself as a shared human capacity. The quote no longer belonged only to my own creative life. It belonged to the room.

Lesson Seven: Care Lives in the Details

Some of the most meaningful moments I have witnessed did not come from formal programs or planned activities. They came from details.

Handmade yarn wigs offered not as solutions, but as gestures. Home-cooked food served where nourishment is often transactional. A nurse pausing to explain why quiet is protected. These are not extras. They are signals.

They tell a child: you are seen. They tell a family: this place cares how it feels to be here.

Art belongs to this same category. When it is treated as a detail that matters, rather than an accessory, it becomes part of how dignity is communicated.

Lesson Eight: When Measurement Serves Understanding—Not Control

There is a temptation—especially in social impact work—to justify art through metrics alone. To demand proof, scalability, and efficiency before presence, relationship, or trust have had time to form. When this happens, art risks being reduced to a tool with predetermined outcomes.

In care settings, art does not function like a checklist. It functions like space. It holds complexity. It allows contradiction. It does not rush resolution.

At the same time, I have learned that refusing measurement altogether is not the answer. When approached with care, listening, and humility, research and medical metrics can help us better understand what children are already telling us through their bodies, their attention, and their engagement.

The difference lies in intention. When metrics are used to observe rather than direct, to support learning rather than justify control, they can deepen—not diminish—our understanding of how art supports healing. In this way, measurement becomes a companion to care, not its replacement.

The discomfort that comes from holding both openness and accountability is not a flaw. It is a requirement in environments shaped by vulnerability, ethics, and trust.

Still Learning

I do not consider these lessons complete. They continue to evolve with each space, each child, each encounter. What remains constant is the reminder that care is not only what we do, but how we do it—and that art, when treated as social infrastructure rather than a program, has the power to change how that care is felt.

Some of this learning is now being explored in collaboration with healthcare partners through careful observation and research—always with the goal of listening more closely, not simplifying what cannot be rushed.

This essay reflects insights gathered through lived practice. For narrative reflections from specific moments in this work, see Before I Forget Stories.