Events

Day of Scholarship 2026

Alumni Public Event Students

The Seattle School is hosting its fourth community-wide Day of Scholarship, open to all students, alumni, staff, and faculty as contributors and guests. This event aims to connect The Seattle School community members to the wider disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations we are having as an institution. This year’s Day of Scholarship invites us to continue the interdisciplinary conversation that Dr. Doug Shirley began at the fall residency as we consider how the work of learning is also the work of unlearning. What does it take for our one-to-one representations—of people, experiences, even ourselves—to open into symbols that connect, heal, and transform the whole? How are grief, identity, culture, and loss woven into our capacity to learn in ways that exceed information and move toward formation?

Schedule

8:00 am-8:30 am: Check in & Breakfast

8:30 am-9:30 am: Poster Reception & Underrepresented Voices Art Gallery

9:45 am-11:00 am: Plenary Speaker, Dr. Lauren Sawyer

11:15 am-12:30 pm: Breakout Sessions

12:30 pm-1:00 pm Wrap Up: Large Classroom

 

Day of Scholarship 2026 Poster Presentations

Poster Presenter(s) Affiliation Poster Title
Maggie Hemphill, LMHCA Alumni “Entering Wonderland: Nested Realities and Subsidiary Focal Integration as Precursors to Play”
Daniel Schultz, Emma Samusi, Hannah Rogers, Mark Holyfield, Olivia Fugler Students “How the Embodied Shame of a Primary Caregiver Contributes to Shame and Dissociation in the Adult Child”
Alicia Bettger Student “Making the Invisible Visible: Art as a Bridge in Play Therapy for PTSD”
Mariko Saeki Student “Moral Injury Framework Creates Space for Nuances and Complexities of Suffering While Avoiding Pathologization: Exploring Moral Agency in Context of Immigrants’ Population”
Ann Plana, Maggie Hemphill Alumi “Object Relations in Practice – Identifying and Working with the Kleinian Psychic Positions”
 Jessica Emerson Student “Reimagining Love, Ethics and Fidelity in the Therapy Room”
 Dr. Allison Bradford Chow Faculty “Rooting a Clinical Mind in Experience: What is the British Object Relations Concentration”
 Leanne Klingenberg, Renee Robertson, Rachael Lenoir, Liv Fugler, Emma Samusi Students “Sexual Location: A Framework for Understanding Sexuality in Clinical Practice”
 Katherine Archer Student “Sexual Trauma-induced PTSD and Implications for Women’s Mental Health Treatment”
 Katie Meeks, Kindal Loy, Emily Neely Students “Through the Prism, Tracing The Development of Vulnerability in Therapy”
 Emme Wagner Student “When Your Child Mirrors Your Younger Self: Unlearning Through the Parent-Child Encounter”

Day of Scholarship 2026 Breakout Session Presenters

Session Presenter(s) Affiliation Session Title
Claire Henning, Dr. Paul Hoard Student, Faculty “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Turn-Based AI Role-Play in Developing Counseling Competencies”
Nicholas Diaz Staff “Poetics & Praxis: An Experiment in Writing, Thinking, and Acting”
Ann Plana, Maggie Hemphill Alumni “Object Relations in Practice – Identifying and Working with the Kleinian Psychic Positions”
Rachael Lenoir, Dr. Ron Ruthruff, Student, Faculty “Conversations Toward Justice: A Mentoring Relationship in Antiracism Work”
Wendell Moss Faculty, Staff “Integrating Narrative Focused Trauma Care (NFTC) and Psychotherapeutic Modalities”
Jermaine Ma, PhD, Mariko Saeki, Felicia Tran, Student, Faculty, Alumni, Staff “Desire, Authenticity and the Development of the Asian American Self: The Intersection of Christian Theology & Psychology Towards Generativity and Reclamation”
 Leanne Klingenberg, Renee Robertson Students “Sexual Location: A Framework for Understanding Sexuality in Clinical Practice”
Rose Madrid Swetman Staff “Unlearning Control: Resilience as a Practice of Surrender”
Emme Wagner Student “When Words Break Open: Poetry as Unlearning After Betrayal”
Jayelle Minor, Dr. Doug Shirley  Alumni, Faculty “The Myth of Meritocracy: how this Western ideology entrenches ableism and impacts therapy”

 

Underrepresented Voices Art Gallery

Theme: Imagining Unlearning as Transformation

As people of color and members of other marginalized communities, we often find ourselves represented through the lenses of the majority—through stories, symbols, and images not our own. We learn to conform ourselves into majority boxes, learn to tell and recognize only majority-friendly stories. The work of transformation, then, begins with unlearning: unlearning the narratives that have shaped how we see ourselves and how we are seen.

Sometimes that unlearning means gently loosening, or breaking open, the hold of containers never built with us in mind, containers that have taught us to shrink, translate, or edit our ways of being. As we unlearn those constraints, we begin to rediscover the spaces within and between us that were always ours, though we may have learned to forget them.

This gallery invites artists and creators of color to explore how unlearning can itself be an act of artmaking; how the shedding of imposed images opens space for symbols that heal, connect, and reimagine identity. Each piece becomes a new story added to the collective pot, expanding what wholeness can look like when we are fully seen and self-defined.

We are welcoming all mediums of art and creative work. While the gallery in The Seattle School building will be a physical gallery, we invite submissions that are not traditional physical/visual mediums. For example, if you are a musician, songwriter, dancer, etc., consider contributing a visual manifestation of your craft for the gallery. This could be a photo of you doing your craft, some lyrics, a QR code linking to a recording of your piece, etc.