Also in the tradition of SoTL and its growing contemporary emphasis on student well-being as intrinsic to learning, Ziyuan Lin and Nisara Jaroenkajornkij invited Thai undergraduate students to explore stressors and coping mechanisms through short-form video and written reflections and analysed the findings. They found that the video format enhanced emotional expression among the participating undergraduate students, with implications for its therapeutic application with other groups of young people experiencing distress.

University educators are more influential than they might suppose in shaping the pedagogical and social conditions of student well-being and learning (Bannigan et al., 2025). Moreover, the process of consulting students as partners and implementing their suggestions can, in itself, promote their sense of agency and inclusion as well as deepen our understanding as educators (Baik et al., 2019). With arts therapies scholars well-positioned to conduct such collaborative enquiries, we look forward to the next iterations of these important SoTL studies.

Meanwhile, in this issue of JoCAT, several arts therapists offer us a window into their training experiences through arts-based autoethnographies. Bursary recipient cat ko creates wonderfully poignant and pointed comics that chart the perils and promises of their development of an artist–therapist identity during their placement year. Samantha Neubronner navigates the complexity of holding space for Singaporean elders of the ‘pioneer generation’ as they approach death, in the profoundly formative experience of her final training placement. And senior Māori arts therapist Robyn Angell-Morice offers us an extraordinarily far-reaching account of her journey through Te Wheiao in the slow and illuminating dawning of a bicultural arts therapy identity.

Education and its interconnectedness with wellbeing and identity begin far earlier than university of course, in early childhood. Georgia Freebody’s invention of Therapeutic Art Play (TAP) takes arts therapy into and beyond early childhood settings. Freebody’s research ‘TAP’s into artworking as a material and relational process that honours the agency and wisdom of young children among the multiple co-creating agencies of materials, people and places.

RTM unfolds an arts-based autoethnographic, sensory and epistemological enquiry that centres neurodiversity, destabilising the power of neurotypical discourse in the creative arts therapies through serious and playful questioning. Susannah Morrison brings the neglected and highly significant life-threatening condition of sepsis vividly to our attention through a visceral and instructive account of her own survival. Junhaoran Li engages reflectively with Daoist philosophy to propose insights for arts therapy pedagogy, theory and practice “beyond words”. Mishy Rowan constructs a protective creative space in which to gently consider our precious relations with nature in the face of climate change.

The extension of the CATs into other domains of enquiry also typifies the reviews that round out this issue of JoCAT, which variously canvas books, exhibitions and now podcasts in order to tempt and enrich the repertoire of experiences vicariously available to JoCAT readers and listeners.

Finally, a group of early career art therapists who trained together at Western Sydney University, Ko, Law and Cheung – although I want to affectionately call them cat, Coco and Clara – quickly mobilised to support the Sydney-based Hong Kong community after the Tai Po fire. Their passion, responsiveness, care, and collegiality alongside other Hongkongers making a statement through art, are caught in a short and eloquent piece for JoCAT. As the paper cranes of long life fly back to Hong Kong, this generation of creative art therapists gives us hope.

And, as I conclude writing this brief editorial the day after the massacre at Bondi Beach of people celebrating the beginning of Hannukah, hope is sorely needed.

Australians have been asked to light a candle and place it in our front windows this evening.