Custom Trainings by Bartol
Custom Trainings for Arts & Education Organizations
Are you seeking ways to create safer, more responsive arts learning environments? Would your staff, teaching artists, and community leaders benefit from additional capacity as they support students and program participants? Do you want to integrate trauma-informed practice into your organization in a way that aligns with your mission, audience, and art form?
Let us come to you! Bartol offers pre-packaged and customizable training for nonprofits, collectives, and cultural institutions looking to build shared understanding, language, and tools for trauma-informed arts education. Whether you want a single workshop or a full training series, we’ll help you design a session that meets your needs—and your budget.
Choose a Format That Works for You
At Bartol, we know that every organization faces unique challenges—and that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building safer, more responsive arts learning spaces. Our custom trainings are designed to meet you where you are, helping your team deepen its understanding of trauma-informed practice while staying true to your mission, community, and art form. With experienced facilitators, flexible formats, and practical tools, we’ll partner with you to create meaningful, sustainable change.
support your teaching artists and staff
What Do You Get from a Custom Bartol Training?
Experienced facilitators who are also practicing artists and arts administrators
Customized content that meets your organization’s goals
Flexible scheduling around your team’s availability
Live modeling of trauma-informed techniques and creative strategies
Training materials and additional learning resources
A shared foundation of trauma-informed values, vocabulary, and skills across your team
Every workshop blends science, strategy, and creativity, grounded in how stress and trauma affect the brain, body, and learning, and is tailored to the needs of your participants, staff, and teaching artists.
More Questions? Contact:
Arts. Community. Transformation.
All Disciplines:
Arts Education Through a Trauma-Informed Lens
A foundational 4-hour training introducing arts educators to trauma-informed practice. Learn how stress and trauma affect learning, and gain tools to create safe, supportive, and engaging arts environments rooted in empathy and care.
Arts Education Through a Trauma-Informed Lens (4 hours)
Our recommended baseline training for organizations that want to introduce trauma-informed practice to their teaching artists, this session provides a foundation in stress, trauma, and its potential impact on individuals. Then, we’ll explore how stress and trauma connect to some key areas of brain theory that demonstrate when the brain is – and isn’t – primed to learn, and what we can do as facilitators to help our participants engage, retain, and apply learning.
After a short break, we will connect the five basic needs often impacted by trauma to how our art form can both challenge and grow these areas for our students. Finally, we will consider how social dynamics (present in both in-person and remote learning) can trigger the fight-flight-freeze response, and what we can do in our curriculum structures and facilitation practices to account for these dynamics and create a supportive space for all. Time to process, question, and brainstorm through the use of sample tools, reflective free-writes, and small group discussion will be threaded throughout the presentation to help educators connect these behavioral theories to their arts educator practice.
Arts Administration Through a Trauma-Informed Lens
A foundational 4-hour training for arts administrators exploring trauma-informed practice. Learn how stress and safety impact the brain, relationships, and workplace culture, and gain tools to build supportive, responsive, and resilient organizations.
Arts Administration Through a Trauma-Informed Lens (4 hours)
Our recommended baseline training for organizations that want to explore trauma-informed practice as a staff, the session begins with an examination of the intersection between stress, safety, and the brain. We’ll use this foundation to connect some key areas of brain theory that demonstrate when the brain is – and isn’t – primed to think critically and relate to others, to what we can do in our organizational structures to offer support.
We will also examine the concept of novelty as it relates to job responsibilities and relationships, and how facing new things can challenge the five basic needs often impacted by stressors.
Finally, we will consider how social dynamics (present in both in-person and remote work) can trigger our survival response, and what we can do in our organizational structures and culture to account for these dynamics and create a supportive relational space for all. Time to process, question, and brainstorm through the use of sample tools, reflective free-writes and group discussion will be threaded throughout the presentation to help administrators connect these behavioral theories to their workplace practices.
Building a Culture of Belonging in the Classroom
A dynamic workshop for educators on moving beyond inclusion to true belonging. Explore curriculum design, engagement strategies, and classroom practices that foster supportive, connected learning spaces where every student feels seen and valued.
Building a Culture of Belonging in the Classroom
Lead Facilitator: Enoch the Poet
“Inclusion” is a word thrown around very heavily in a lot of trauma-informed and healing-centered spaces, and especially in the classroom, but inclusion is not enough. In this workshop, we will dive into what it means to foster a culture of “belonging” in the classroom. Covering topics from curriculum adjustments to student engagement, participants will gain strategies for facilitating more supportive spaces than what the current systems lead us to believe are possible.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
Creative Spacemaking and Human Centered Gathering
A hands-on workshop exploring how to design gatherings that foster connection and trust. Blending trauma-informed facilitation, somatic practices, and creative exploration, participants learn to create spaces—anywhere—that inspire belonging and lasting impact.
Creative Spacemaking and Human Centered Gathering
Lead Facilitator: Bets Charmelus
In a world where connection can feel fleeting, this workshop offers a new approach to bringing people together. Creative Spacemaking and Human Centered Gathering blends trauma-informed facilitation, somatic practices, and creative exploration to transform how we think about gathering – whether in classrooms, boardrooms, Zoom rooms, or living rooms! Through engaging, artful methods, participants will be able to design spaces that cultivate connections, build trust, and leave a lasting impact, regardless of the gathering’s purpose.
Trauma-Informed Practice: Reinventing the Creative Classroom
A reflective workshop for teaching artists to reimagine traditional classrooms through a trauma-informed lens. Explore the history of classroom power dynamics, learn to advocate for supportive practices, and design creative spaces rooted in care and equity.
Trauma-Informed Practice: Reinventing the Creative Classroom
Lead Facilitator: Bets Charmelus
As teaching artists, we often enter traditional classrooms that are steeped in traditions and power dynamics that are not trauma-informed. This workshop is designed to unpack the historical context as to why these rituals exist and explore our own experiences in classrooms, both as students and teaching artists. Together, we will investigate how we can make our spaces trauma-informed, construct language for engaging with administrators/leadership as to why trauma-informed approaches are beneficial, and discuss how to uproot harmful classroom practices.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
Uprooting Shame from Learning Spaces
A powerful workshop exploring how shame impacts creativity and learning. Participants will examine how shame shows up in classrooms, unpack its effects on artistic growth, and gain tools to replace shame-based teaching with supportive, empowering practices.
Uprooting Shame from Learning Spaces
Lead Facilitator: Candy Alexandra González
Learners experiencing feelings of shame during the learning process might not have the capacity to engage critically with new art forms or take the necessary risks to grow artistically. Like trauma, feelings of shame can lead a person to shut down or experience anxiety. In this session, the facilitator will offer multiple definitions and principles of shame from leading researchers. As a group, we will consider how shame shows up in learning spaces and how it impacts learners. Additionally, the facilitator will offer tools for unlearning shame-based teaching practices and for developing supportive learning structures.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
Discipline-Specific Training:
Considering Novelty, Stressors, and Trauma in Theatre (Theatre)
A trauma-informed workshop for theatre artists and educators exploring how stress and survival responses shape creativity and learning. Gain insight into triggers, regulation techniques, and practices that support emotional safety, connection, and creative freedom in the theatre space.
Considering Novelty, Stressors, and Trauma in Theatre (Theatre)
Lead Facilitator: Mae Early
When we enter any space, we navigate, relate, and respond to what’s happening based on the sum of our previous experiences and the full of our identity and beliefs. As theatre artists and educators, understanding how and why our brains intake information and react reflexively can help us better understand the stressors and triggers that may arise when students are performing challenging material, rehearsing high-stakes relational moments, or even exploring a new method of performance or skill.
In this workshop, we will examine how our brain is built to ensure our survival, how our stress response can impact our brain’s ability to learn and create, how this influences our basic needs and our ability to relate to others, and how our stress response impacts our bodies. Then, we will explore practices that can help students and ourselves regulate and process these stressors in the moment they occur, as well as broadly over time through consistent self-care.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
Invitation and Agency in Writing Spaces (Creative Writing)
A trauma-informed creative writing workshop exploring how stress and past experiences shape the writing process. Through discussion and free-writing, participants will learn strategies to invite engagement, foster agency, and create supportive, affirming writing spaces.
Invitation and Agency in Writing Spaces (Creative Writing)
Lead Facilitator: Mae Early
When it comes to writing, every student will have needs, express interests, and encounter challenges that are individualized and often connected to past experiences. Together, we will examine how research from the behavioral health community about basic needs, belief systems, and shame can provide a window into how stress, fear, and anxiety can enter into the writing process.
Then, through a blend of tools, free-writes, and discussion, we will create a student-centered, trauma-sensitive approach that considers questions such as: how we invite students to engage with writing, how we can offer greater student agency when we ask students to share their writing with others, and how we build a supportive, affirming environment during feedback and reflective practices.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
The Art of Critique (Visual Art)
A trauma-informed workshop for visual arts educators on transforming critique culture. Explore how trauma and shame can appear in group critiques and learn tools for active listening, supportive feedback, and facilitating positive, growth-centered critique experiences.
The Art of Critique (Visual Art)
Lead Facilitator: Candy Alexandra González
For generations, group art critiques have been regarded as a formative learning experience for art school students. How a critique is structured or how a critique is facilitated varies greatly from school to school, classroom to classroom. With such little training available for educators to learn how to facilitate a positive and transformative critique experience, it is common for students to have negative experiences in critique spaces. In this session, participants will develop an understanding of trauma and shame, how it shows up in critique spaces, and how to use trauma-informed care to facilitate group art critiques. Participants will learn about active listening and giving supportive feedback.
>Contact us to schedule a training.
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