What is Canvas?
A Behavior Analytic Art curriculum for both neurodiverse and neurotypical learners, ages 3 and up.
The program book takes you into the foundational science behind the curriculum, provides a step-by-step process of the program and how to adapt to your child’s needs and current repertoires. It also shows how to combine it with your child’s current programming. Natasha Bouchillon’s background in fine art and behavior analysis brings a unique intervention approach to facilitating emergent learning, functional communication, and cultivation of creative behavior known as “aesthetic behavior“. In other academic and scientific disciplines, we typically know this as creative intelligence or creative thinking.
Canvas provides its own assessment and test kit, skill programs, art lessons, data recording sheets, and progress monitoring forms in this comprehensive book.
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Why Canvas?
We have spent a generation teaching children with disabilities to label and ask for things. We chase after academic goals or medical necessity. What about skills that touch on the more human side of life?
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The dreams, the emotions, the joy, the creativeness.
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These make us who we are.
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We have all seen the rigid thinking, the lack of creativity, or the lack of spontaneous joy and expression.
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It is time for more than generic skills. Embedding training during the day is great, but what about making the day more than stumble through and catch the moments? What if we used Art as the medium to expand creativity, language, leisure expansion or social engagement?
The Philosophy Behind Art Behavior
“The main thing is not just putting paint on canvas. It’s putting it on in such a way that it will be pleasurable, satisfying, beautiful, or reinforcing.” - B.F. Skinner
Creative thinking is not only an essential skill that helps open access to other resources in their community but brings value to the world. B.F. Skinner has spoken on the need for cultivating artists in our world.
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Read or listen to his talk at Guggenheim museum here>
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