Abstract: My inquiry, involving participant-observation and self-study, explores the stories of four older women through verbal and visual narratives. Showing how two specific types of visual narratives—sandpictures and collages—stimulate experiential story-telling and promote understanding about life experiences, I also illustrate how engagement with images extends learning and meaning-making. Effective in carrying life stories and integrating experience, the visual narratives also reveal archetypal imagery that is sustained and sustaining. Considering how visual narratives may be understood independently, I describe multiple strategies that worked for me for entering deeply into the images. I also elaborate on the relationship of visual narratives to accompanying verbal narratives, describing how tacit knowing may evolve. Through this process, I offer a framework for a curricular approach to visual narratives that involves feeling and seeing aesthetically and associatively and that provides a space for learners to express their individual stories and make meaning of significant life events. Salient narrative themes include confrontation with life-death issues, the experience of “creating a new life,” an avid early interest in books and learning, and a vital connection to the natural world. New professions after mid-life, creative expression, and volunteerism provide fulfillment and challenge as life changes promote attempts to marry relationships with self and others to work and service. My therapy practice room was the setting for five sessions, including an introduction, three experiential sandplay sessions, and a conclusion. Data derive from transcripts from free-flowing conversations, written narratives, photographs of sandpictures, and field notes written throughout the various phases of my doctoral process. This study of older women, with its emphasis on lifelong learning, visual narratives, and development of tacit knowing, will contribute to the field of narrative inquiry already strongly grounded in verbal narrative and teacher education/development. It may also promote in-depth investigations of male learners at a life stage of making meaning of, and integrating, their life experiences. New inquirers may note what I did and how it worked for me, and find their unique ways of extending the study of visual narratives while venturing into the broad field of diverse narrative forms.

This narrative research examines the ways in which craft is conceptualized from the perspective of five recent graduates from the Material Art and Design Fibre Program at a prominent Canadian art and design university. Recognizing the cultural currents that have excised acts of making, including Western de-industrialization and abundant access to offshore labour markets, this research looks at the role of maker within a new societal context. A nascent theoretical platform for craft, shaped by artists and academics, counters a dearth of voices that has characterized the field’s history. Here, craft is posited as a methodology, characterized by embodiment, subjectivity, resistance, and skill. The experience of emerging makers, and their reflection in relation to this theoretical framework, allows for a broader consideration of present-day craft practice, and a renewed consideration of material arts curricula.

This narrative research examines the ways in which craft is conceptualized from the perspective of five recent graduates from the Material Art and Design Fibre Program at a prominent Canadian art and design university. Recognizing the cultural currents that have excised acts of making, including Western de-industrialization and abundant access to offshore labour markets, this research looks at the role of maker within a new societal context. A nascent theoretical platform for craft, shaped by artists and academics, counters a dearth of voices that has characterized the field’s history. Here, craft is posited as a methodology, characterized by embodiment, subjectivity, resistance, and skill. The experience of emerging makers, and their reflection in relation to this theoretical framework, allows for a broader consideration of present-day craft practice, and a renewed consideration of material arts curricula.

Abstract: My inquiry, involving participant-observation and self-study, explores the stories of four older women through verbal and visual narratives. Showing how two specific types of visual narratives—sandpictures and collages—stimulate experiential story-telling and promote understanding about life experiences, I also illustrate how engagement with images extends learning and meaning-making. Effective in carrying life stories and integrating experience, the visual narratives also reveal archetypal imagery that is sustained and sustaining. Considering how visual narratives may be understood independently, I describe multiple strategies that worked for me for entering deeply into the images. I also elaborate on the relationship of visual narratives to accompanying verbal narratives, describing how tacit knowing may evolve. Through this process, I offer a framework for a curricular approach to visual narratives that involves feeling and seeing aesthetically and associatively and that provides a space for learners to express their individual stories and make meaning of significant life events. Salient narrative themes include confrontation with life-death issues, the experience of “creating a new life,” an avid early interest in books and learning, and a vital connection to the natural world. New professions after mid-life, creative expression, and volunteerism provide fulfillment and challenge as life changes promote attempts to marry relationships with self and others to work and service. My therapy practice room was the setting for five sessions, including an introduction, three experiential sandplay sessions, and a conclusion. Data derive from transcripts from free-flowing conversations, written narratives, photographs of sandpictures, and field notes written throughout the various phases of my doctoral process. This study of older women, with its emphasis on lifelong learning, visual narratives, and development of tacit knowing, will contribute to the field of narrative inquiry already strongly grounded in verbal narrative and teacher education/development. It may also promote in-depth investigations of male learners at a life stage of making meaning of, and integrating, their life experiences. New inquirers may note what I did and how it worked for me, and find their unique ways of extending the study of visual narratives while venturing into the broad field of diverse narrative forms.

This thesis interweaves the Reggio Emilia preschool model of atelier (art studio) and atelierista (artist educator), autobiography, timeless and embodied learning. I am interested in exploring approaches in which visual arts education in elementary schools disrupts traditional ways of knowing and learning about art. When an atelierista is embraced in the school environment, a rupture emerges in the landscape of education; one that recognizes the interconnectivity of things, and values difference and unknown. For this reason, I align my research with a form of inquiry – a/r/tography, which acknowledges intertwining roles of artist/researcher/teacher as integral parts of the research process. As such, my own art making is used as a form of inquiry and language in the text of this thesis.

The original face-to-face encounter of American Indians in portraits and pictorial field studies reiterates the encounter between the colonial state, settlers and Indigenous communities. Mechanical reproduction had extended visual technologies creating a revolution in communications which began with the early use of the woodcut (around 1461). A tradition of portraiture from the eighteenth century then re-imagined American Indian peoples for new social and political uses. This dissertation begins by introducing the frontier representations of artists Benjamin West, George Catlin, Paul Kane and William G. R. Hind. Attention then shifts to the collaborative relation between photographer and subject required by the photographic technology of the period. The pictorial contact moment was an interactive communication between photographer and subject. Hence the image-making contact moment is a dialogue, an interchange. Thus the image became a meeting ground where cultural processes were intersubjective and where the present interacted with the past. At the centre of these representations is a two-way looking within a dialogical imagination. As colonial powers expanded and increased control territorially, changes in the dialogic relations were marked in the subject’s presentation of self, the artists’ renditions and the photographer’s aesthetics. Earlier artists like Benjamin West in “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) used the publishing industry to challenge monologic stereotypes. However, as colonial powers exerted greater repressions, lucrative popular culture industries like the Wild West Shows constituted an imagined frontier which called for several other perspectival approaches: Lakota Chief Red Cloud used the photographic medium for peace activism and community building, Harry Pollard’s photojournalism documented Indigenous communities in Alberta and Edward S. Curtis’s pictorialism became a genre of ethnography in the twenty volume, "The North American Indian". Using a historical framework and interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation examines early representations of the North American West in a dialogue as a frontier of difference iterated through technologies of illustration and photography.

The original face-to-face encounter of American Indians in portraits and pictorial field studies reiterates the encounter between the colonial state, settlers and Indigenous communities. Mechanical reproduction had extended visual technologies creating a revolution in communications which began with the early use of the woodcut (around 1461). A tradition of portraiture from the eighteenth century then re-imagined American Indian peoples for new social and political uses. This dissertation begins by introducing the frontier representations of artists Benjamin West, George Catlin, Paul Kane and William G. R. Hind. Attention then shifts to the collaborative relation between photographer and subject required by the photographic technology of the period. The pictorial contact moment was an interactive communication between photographer and subject. Hence the image-making contact moment is a dialogue, an interchange. Thus the image became a meeting ground where cultural processes were intersubjective and where the present interacted with the past. At the centre of these representations is a two-way looking within a dialogical imagination. As colonial powers expanded and increased control territorially, changes in the dialogic relations were marked in the subject’s presentation of self, the artists’ renditions and the photographer’s aesthetics. Earlier artists like Benjamin West in “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) used the publishing industry to challenge monologic stereotypes. However, as colonial powers exerted greater repressions, lucrative popular culture industries like the Wild West Shows constituted an imagined frontier which called for several other perspectival approaches: Lakota Chief Red Cloud used the photographic medium for peace activism and community building, Harry Pollard’s photojournalism documented Indigenous communities in Alberta and Edward S. Curtis’s pictorialism became a genre of ethnography in the twenty volume, "The North American Indian". Using a historical framework and interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation examines early representations of the North American West in a dialogue as a frontier of difference iterated through technologies of illustration and photography.

Situated within Toronto's expanding and increasingly segregated educational marketplace, this study examines how parents of students at one elite publicly funded specialized arts high school make meaning of their school choice decision. Utilizing a Neo-Marxist framework, I explore the role that material and symbolic resources play in making this school choice both available and exclusive. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of parent narratives to expose how they mobilize dominant discourses of the arts in order to produce the school as a good choice, and themselves as good parents. This research challenges dominant conceptions of the arts in education by showing how the arts are used to reinforce, obscure, and justify existing social hierarchies in school settings and society at large. This study further serves as an example of how arts education research can move beyond positivist conceptions of the arts.

Situated within Toronto's expanding and increasingly segregated educational marketplace, this study examines how parents of students at one elite publicly funded specialized arts high school make meaning of their school choice decision. Utilizing a Neo-Marxist framework, I explore the role that material and symbolic resources play in making this school choice both available and exclusive. I conduct a critical discourse analysis of parent narratives to expose how they mobilize dominant discourses of the arts in order to produce the school as a good choice, and themselves as good parents. This research challenges dominant conceptions of the arts in education by showing how the arts are used to reinforce, obscure, and justify existing social hierarchies in school settings and society at large. This study further serves as an example of how arts education research can move beyond positivist conceptions of the arts.

This thesis interweaves the Reggio Emilia preschool model of atelier (art studio) and atelierista (artist educator), autobiography, timeless and embodied learning. I am interested in exploring approaches in which visual arts education in elementary schools disrupts traditional ways of knowing and learning about art. When an atelierista is embraced in the school environment, a rupture emerges in the landscape of education; one that recognizes the interconnectivity of things, and values difference and unknown. For this reason, I align my research with a form of inquiry – a/r/tography, which acknowledges intertwining roles of artist/researcher/teacher as integral parts of the research process. As such, my own art making is used as a form of inquiry and language in the text of this thesis.