In November 2023, Baratang Initiatives facilitated a six-day intensive HAPPY training in collaboration with Drama for Life, University of the Witwatersrand, and the NPO Phola. The programme brought together pre-service teachers from the Wits BEd programme alongside facilitators working in educational and community contexts. As part of this process, four trainers were developed, strengthening shared capacity to carry trauma-informed, arts-based practices into schools and community settings.

The training foregrounded the importance of embodied learning and the use of imagination as pedagogical and therapeutic tools. Participants explored how complex psychological concepts can be communicated through movement, image, and story, enabling learning to be experienced physically and emotionally rather than approached only cognitively. Storytelling, in particular, offered a way to engage with difficult material while maintaining emotional distance and psychological safety.

As one participant reflected:

“I learned that storytelling and drama can be powerful tools for learning, I had fun, I felt connected, and I understood the story in a whole new way”.

A key focus of the training was supporting educators and facilitators to remain emotionally attuned while avoiding overwhelm or re-traumatisation. By working within imaginative and narrative structures, participants were able to explore themes of trauma, resilience, and care in grounded and ethically held ways. This approach models trauma-sensitive practice that can be transferred directly into classrooms and community-based programmes.

The collaboration between Baratang Initiatives, Drama for Life, and Phola highlighted the value of partnership in strengthening educational and psychosocial practice. Together, the organisations demonstrated how arts-based, healing-centred education can support teachers and facilitators to work with complexity through care, creativity, and confidence—benefiting practitioners, learners, and the wider communities they serve.

The body often holds what words cannot. Because trauma lives in the body, healing must also involve the body. In response to this, Baratang Initiatives facilitated a six-day HAPPy training that highlighted the power of movement and rhythm as tools for regulation, connection, and resilience.

This training took place in collaboration with Youth@Work, Drama for Life (University of the Witwatersrand), and their community-based programme in Mas’phefumle. Together, we worked with emerging practitioners who wanted practical, embodied ways to support children and young people affected by trauma.

Throughout the training, participants explored how rhythmic movement, pattern, and embodied play support trauma-informed work. In particular, they learned how rhythm can stabilise the nervous system. It helps restore a sense of timing and predictability. As a result, it also rebuilds connection to self and others — especially where trauma has disrupted safety, trust, and learning.

After the training, four HAPPy-trained interns were placed in four schools across Gauteng. There, they worked directly with learners using movement-based and rhythmic activities. These sessions supported emotional regulation, strengthened social connection, and encouraged creative expression. Importantly, they also offered learners simple ways to release stress and experience joy and agency within the school environment.

One of the key outcomes of the project was the creation of a community festival at each school. These festivals celebrated local culture through storytelling, movement, music, and performance. Moreover, they brought together learners, educators, families, and community members. In doing so, they strengthened relationships and affirmed shared identity. Through rhythm and dance, the festivals became spaces of belonging, visibility, and resilience.

Overall, this collaboration demonstrated the strength of embodied, arts-based approaches to trauma. By working through movement and rhythm, the HAPPy programme supported both individual wellbeing and collective healing. Most importantly, it helped schools and communities come together to imagine safer, more connected futures.

Children do not leave their experiences at the school gate. Many arrive in classrooms carrying stress, fear, and unspoken trauma — and teachers are often the first to notice when learning becomes difficult. In response, Baratang Initiatives facilitated a six-day HAPPy training for pre-service teachers at the Centre for Creative Education, offering practical, art-based tools to support emotional regulation, connection, and learning.

The training centred on embodied and imaginative learning — using movement, gesture, story, singing, rhythmic play, and visual art to explore how trauma lives in the body and how it can be expressed safely, without re-traumatisation. Rather than talking about trauma, participants experienced how creativity creates distance, safety, and meaning.

One student reflected on the atmosphere created through these practices:

“Sitting in that circle gave the class a sense of calm and togetherness, like we were about to begin something meaningful.”

Storytelling emerged as a powerful container for reflection and growth. Working with narrative structures such as the Hero’s Journey allowed students to explore challenge, resilience, and transformation symbolically — building confidence in using voice and body as tools for communication. As one participant shared:

“Drama became a safe space for reflection and emotional release… shaping my narrative helped me recognise my own resilience and growth.”

Rhythm, song, and playful movement helped participants experience how regulation and connection can be restored in a group — essential conditions for learning. These simple practices showed how classrooms can become calmer, more inclusive spaces where children feel seen and supported.

By the end of the training, many students described a shift in their identity as future teachers. One reflected:

“I now see myself not just as a future educator, but as a guide who can help children find their voices and stories through artistic expression.”

This HAPPy training reaffirmed the power of the arts as essential tools for education and wellbeing. When teachers are equipped with creative, embodied practices, classrooms can become spaces of safety, expression, and resilience — for both learners and educators.

Working with as much interactivity as possible online, the sessions were able to balance fun, knowledge, sensitivity and safety to allow for a more holistic and conducive learning experience:

Feedback from some of the participants: 

“Thank you very much for the very useful information I will be using it in the class”

“We deal with a lot of teenagers and we find ourselves having to deal with learners with trauma on a daily basis and it would be nice to see if these can help center them when they feel like they are in a storm.”

Baratang Initiatives was approached by an organization that provides employment to South African youth. The protest action, violence, and looting found many of these youths suddenly without jobs. Doing a psycho-educational intervention during the acute phase of this traumatic incident gave us the opportunity to see if the principles and techniques we teach were applicable to young adults. Could arts methodology and trauma principles provide some stability to the young adults and support their own self-healing?

Upon reaching a recreation hall located in Soweto we got orientated and started the session with an embodied opening circle. We proceeded to share the psycho-educational content around trauma, which acted as the foundational understanding to the practical techniques we taught them, to help regulate and calm themselves. We shared how trauma affects us and how to employ simple techniques that can regulate, balance, and stabilize us. Despite how insurmountable their situation appeared, providing a communal platform to voice their concerns, worries and issues seemed to provide some relief. Feelings of uncertainty, the burden of responsibility, frustration, and stress, fear, and anxiety were mostly expressed. This platform gave them a chance to be heard, but we all benefited from the shared empathic community space.

With a large group of teachers, we had an enriching conversation about trauma in their school environment. Again the teachers posed real-life examples and questions, asking for guidance to appropriately respond to their learner’s behavior. This session affirmed our initial assumption that teachers in South Africa are experiencing a large number of difficult classroom situations resulting from compounded trauma. 

A number of teachers stayed to experience the demonstration and work with the learners in the afternoon.  A pre-selected group of children from various ages participated in our games with enthusiasm, joy, and wonder. Spending time with the children was an extremely validating experience for all involved. Each child felt seen and heard and we were able to demonstrate to the teachers that simple and fun games and exercises can effectively stabilize, ground, and provide a space where self-healing can occur.

The material and logic behind the work are only as good as its application and once again we left feeling that the teachers seemed more confident and equipped, but also more inspired by the potential that this work holds for healing.

One of the schools we visited was located in the province of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In the beautiful countryside of Mooi Rivier, we were warmly welcomed and accommodated by the school’s Principal and teaching staff, who were keen to participate and learn. The small rural school was ‘home’ to just over one hundred students, with grades ranging from Foundation phase to grade seven. 

Our plan was to demonstrate the tools and activities to teachers with one class, but it quickly became clear that all the learners wanted to partake. So we divided the morning into groups, making sure every class had a playful moment with us. Demonstrating games and exercises with the children quickly lead to the enthusiastic participation of the teachers. This moment of connection between teacher and student quickly became an experiential learning moment on how we can use play to assess difficulties and support healing.  The students responded really well to the games, brightly lighting up, creating a very fulfilling experience for all, even the facilitators!

The second part of this training included trauma-informed teacher training based on the neuroscientific approach of Emergency Pedagogy without Borders.  The theory was well received by the teachers as they engaged with the subject material, asking questions and posing ‘real life’ situations to strengthen their understanding of it. The teachers expressed their insecurity to respond to the emotional and sometimes physical needs of their students. They expressed further need for in-depth training, orientated towards healing themselves and the students. However, acknowledging the challenges of working with children experiencing hardship and trauma, the teachers felt they now knew what they were dealing with and what to do when it came to supporting their children to self-heal.

Nearly 6 months later, the school principal has sent us beautiful pictures and videos of the children having fun, singing, and dancing at a Spring Day celebration:

We want to thank you for the eye-opening training you gave us. We all realized the change after we implemented what you taught us.

We responded to the events regarding:

• Lockdown and providing food security in difficult-to-reach areas
• being in communication with Wits students that were in lockdown in communities that were struggling to access resources

And we devised a simple plan. We assisted a student of DFL (WITS), to provide a meal and a gentle joyful game to children from Orange Farm.  With this project, Baratang Initiatives aimed to prevent collective trauma from turning into PTSD, by providing simple relaxing and activating drama games and a meal to children.

Baratang Initiatives, in collaboration with Drama for Life, ensured that the student received the money electronically.  The student in return brought the food and shared a game and a meal with the children in their immediate surroundings.  We knew that sharing stories, games, songs, rhythms, and dances can inspire, stabilize, and ground children and this project proved to confirm it.  At the same time, all lockdown and social distancing rules also had to be followed and implemented to ensure the safety of all involved.

The truth is that our schools are still filled with children who are exposed to poverty, crime, and domestic violence on a daily basis.  The only way to survive in such a world is to run away, freeze or fight back.   In this state, it is impossible for learners to learn or for teachers to teach.  No wonder South Africa’s higher education system ranks 134^th out of 138 countries and that we have such a high unemployment rate.  The Covid-19 pandemic has unearthed the buried trauma that has been lurking in South Africa for years.

That was what this program was all about.  It is a feeding scheme with a difference.  It assisted a student, children, and her community to stabilize their anxieties about food and ‘uncramp’ the debilitating effects of continual anxiety and stress by providing simple tools to re-create physical, mental, and social rhythms. 

South Africa cannot address any of our socio-economic ills unless:

• We can create safe and happy spaces for our children
• Equip teachers/students to understand and deal with the symptoms of trauma
• Build resilience in learners through simple, tried-and-tested therapeutic games and activities

We need your open hearts and financial support to further this and other similar ventures. We urge you to join us in this important task.