What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

This thesis is an A/R/Tographically-based investigation of my appropriative studio approach, resulting in a series of multi-media collage works entitled Tonight’s Programming, dealing with issues of militarism and commercialism in our everyday lives. Through research regarding appropriation in art history, examination of personal artistic influences, and regarding the work through the lenses of Artist, Researcher, and Teacher, I gained a deeper insight into not only my appropriative practices, but how these practices could be applied in the high school art classroom.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis.

What I Meant to Say about Love is an ever-differing interstitial text which has left open spaces for artists, researchers, and teachers, called a/r/tographers, to contest the curriculum and pedagogy of reduction and pragmatic means-ends orientations that monopolize schools. This text wanders, meanders, and digresses to places where, through poetic inquiry, the notion that there is no pedagogy without love can be explored. In a broad understanding of midrash, as it is performed poetically, three years of an English teacher's life are recorded fictionally. James, the main character, discovers that love is a physically potent force that structures and deconstructs, just as it connects and disconnects. His story considers how the professional emphasis in education compartmentalizes and separates the inner life from the outer life. In love with life, with learning, and with others, the James of this story writes poetry to acknowledge love's power, and to restore its credibility in the classroom—that the lovers' discourse might be trusted again. This un/authorized autobiography ruptures the predictable stories of what it means to be a successful teacher by considering one teacher's journey as a limit case, examining phenomenologically how he connects his life of love and poetry to his classroom practice and how his students respond to his poetically charged way of being. My hope is that it might be possible to offer here, in this place, one poet's understanding and celebration of difference in the world. Recognizing the relationship between what is original and what is shifting, I hope to keep complexity and diversity alive, to resist answers, to continue to converse and traverse and transgress. Thus, with careful attention to poetry as a way of knowing and unknowing, and by attending to the paradox, humour, and irony in one poet's lived experiences, both public professings and inner confessings, as they are understood in relations of difference, or as they are understood in relations of decomposition and fertility, it is possible to consider how powerful emotive experiences, oftentimes relegated to the personal and therefore insignificant, can and do have profound transformational effects on praxis. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

This project considers the role of the creative writing teacher in the development of the writer’s identity. Drawing from a/r/tography and fiction-based research, this thesis is written in the form of a novel and presented as an exemplar of arts-based qualitative inquiry in educational research. The novel is organized in a series of stories that follow the life of a young woman named Mona and are about the people she meets, the stories she writes, the places she ends up, and who she becomes along the way. This project is informed by its pilot study, which drew from a narrative approach and included semi-structured interviews where participants were asked to share stories on their becoming a writer. The emergent themes from the pilot study fell within one of two opposing categories: The first being factors that prevented one’s sense of becoming and; the second describing factors that facilitated one’s sense of becoming. The findings from the pilot study were then synthesized into literary themes and are presented in the stories, On Becoming a Writer. This project adds to the growing number of fictional texts as educational research and is presented as an alternative to the standard graduate thesis. This approach seeks to engage its readers to participate in the lives of writers and their stories, and may serve as a resource for teachers of aspiring writers.

Drawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). / Graduate / 2018-05-01 / 0273 / 0727 / 0998 / a.berry089@gmail.com

I dagens samhälle fungerar media som en enorm informationsspridare. Därför är det utav stor vikt att ställa sig frågan om alla grupper kommer till tals i media och därmed få lika stort handlingsutrymme? Alltför ofta använder man sig som betraktare av tv som en källa utan att för den sakens skull tänka kritiskt kring det man har sett. Som betraktare blir vi matade med vinklade perspektiv i vår vardag utan vidare reflektion. Syftet med den här studien var skapandet av ett ämnesintegrerat lektionsupplägg i ämnena bild och So. Den centrala tanken med upplägget var att det skulle öppna upp för samtal med eleverna om grupper som inte får lika mycket exponering i media som andra grupper. Denna implicita maktordning bidrar till en marginalisering och en polarisering där människans värde är beroende av rådande normer samt där individer ställs mot varandra. Under höstterminen 2016 genomförde jag en etnografisk undersökning som baserades på ett lektionsupplägg med förankring i Lgr 11, som behandlade kön, etnicitet, funktionalitet, genus och klass. Undersökningen tog avstamp ur de teoretiska perspektiven socialkonstruktionism, normkritik, postkolonialism, visuell retorik.  Insamlandet av data gjordes med hjälp av etnografiska klassrumsstudier samt a/r/tography vilket senare analyserades med hjälp av metoden diskursanalys. Resultatet av denna undersökning visade att eleverna fann det meningsfullt att jobba med normkritik samt att de ansåg att lärare borde väva in detta mer i sin undervisning istället för att introducera detta ämne under temadagar. Detta arbete består av både en skriftlig del och en gestaltande del. I den gestaltande delen så ställs de insamlade elevernas verk ut i en installation som påvisar elevernas perspektiv av de nyheter som de har fått ta del av i sin undervisning. Dessa illustationer innehåller tankar, funderingar och erfarenheter kring normer och värderingar i dagens samhälle. / In todays’ society media functions as a major source of information. Due to this fact it is important to ask ourselves the question if all groups of society have the same amount of space in media. Too often media and news are used as a validation of source without the question if it is biased information. The purpose of this examination were the creation of a lesson based on subject integration between art and society knowledge. The central thought with the lesson was to create conversations with the pupils about groups that do not have the same coverage in the news as other groups that fit into the norm. This implicit power structure contributes to a marginalisation and a polarisation where the human worth is based on norms that creates a rift among individuals. During the autumn term of 2016 I preformed an ethnographic survey that was based on a lesson anchoring the Swedish curriculum called LGR 11,  in both the subject art and in the subject society knowledge which treated both sex, gender, ethnicity, class and functionality. The survey sprang from the theoretical perspectives such as social constructionism, norm criticism, post colonialism and visual rhetoric's. I collected the data through ethnographic classroom studies and through A/r/tography which was later analysed through the method of discourse analysis. The result of this examination showed that the pupils found this topic meaningful to work with norm criticism  in their education. According to the pupils' opinion, teachers must be more capable of weaving this kind of matters into their teaching without necessarily creating special theme days that addresses norms.  My work consists of a written part and a creative, formative part where the pupils' illustrations are hung in an installation that pictures their view and experience of the news about norms in todays’ society.

Talking about spirituality can be uncomfortable. The topic is especially precarious within the sphere of education. Despite the discomfort and precarity, many scholars argue that there may be room in the postmodern curriculum for safe, open, and generative dialogue about religion and spirituality as cultural phenomena. These curriculum theorists (see Slattery, 2013; Doll, 2002; Huebner, 1991; Noddings, 2005; Whitehead, 1967a/1929; Wang, 2002) propose a sensitive critique of spirituality and religion that can lead to cultural healing, re-membering, re-integration and re-collection (Huebner, 1991). In an increasingly fractured world (Slattery, 2013), where spiritual and religious underpinnings cause an array of conflict, this study works toward critical dialogue in a secondary level public school art classroom. Through art-making, writing, and class discussions, the teacher and student researchers explored, critiqued, and de/constructed their own spirituality<&mdash> with the aim of aggregating, accommodating (Rolling, 2011) and appreciating ways of thinking, being, and practicing that were different from their own. The project adopted A/r/tography as a qualitative research methodology, which views art-making, writing, and conversations as generative pools of data that can produce new understandings, meanings, and potentialities (Irwin et al., 2006; Irwin & de Cosson, 2004; Irwin & Springgay, 2008).

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.

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