The purpose of this research study was to explore how the significance of place serves as a part of Indigenous—specifically Diné (Navajo)—education cultural responsiveness in the art classroom. Further, objectives of the study included learning how North American art teacher educators can more effectively weave Indigenous understandings of place into pre-service art teacher education to benefit Indigenous learners' needs. I employed a qualitative approach to this study using multiple methodologies: ethnography, phenomenology, an Indigenous research methodology, and arts-based research. Through personal interviews with six participants—two Diné artists, two art teacher educators, and two unfamiliar art teachers new to reservation-serving schools—I sought to locate culturally situated perspectives and values. The goal of the interviews was to gather ideas about the significance of place, about relationships between place and art, and about art teacher preparation for teaching in Diné-serving schools. The design of the study also included new unfamiliar non-Diné art teacher preconceptions and in-situ learning experiences of teaching on the reservation. Beyond the participant interviews, I engaged an arts-based exploration of my experiences with Diné people as an outsider/insider member of the Diné community. The artwork I created also helped weave together data from participant interviews. Findings from the Diné artist participants suggested that places hold significance in Diné culture, art making, and the display or use of art. According to Diné epistemological perspective, place is more than just a physical location, and different from some mainstream ideas about place. For Diné interviewees, place is a container of aspects of life such as energies, nature, spirits, people, and a multitude of other significances, some tangible and some intangible. Findings from interviews with art teacher educators of other Indigenous groups also indicated that place is significant to many Native American peoples, and the idea of that significance is difficult to transmit to Euro-American pre-service teachers. Interviews also indicate that focusing teaching education on social justice theories and employing Native American art and artists can assist in the preparation of pre-service art teachers to teach in reservation or pueblo communities. However, there are deeply rooted cultural concepts that come into play once the new teacher reaches her/his teaching assignment community. Lastly, findings revealed that new unfamiliar art teachers experience a number of obstacles upon entering Diné communities when their prior understandings about the place is limited. Challenges include understanding acceptable cultural observances, student proclivities, and art making practices. Understanding significance of place, stereotyping concerns, and positionality challenges are among the themes that arose as a result of cross-participant analyses. The implications of this research study advocate for: a) building further knowledge about educating pre-service teachers about cultural relevance, stereotyping, and positionality in Native American-serving art classrooms; b) the need for continued cultural learning and mentoring in-situ; and c) the need for unfamiliar art teachers to develop culturally relevant teaching practices with the help of people in the community.

No description available.

The Jellyfish Project (JFP) is the environmental initiative that uses music as a means to engage youth, increase awareness about climate realities, and promote behaviour change. Music is an exceptional tool to captivate youths’ attention and increase their receptivity towards environmental messages. The arts also play a role in democratizing engagement and exhibit the potential to mobilize social action and change. Thus, music serves more than a leisure purpose, it can rally youth around a common purpose and create a powerful shared experience between musicians and their audiences. This community-based case study connects arts-centred movements to an ecosystems perspective and social marketing approaches, while establishing social engagement as a social determinant of health. Social engagement is the intentional and active participation in one’s community to create change and requires resources, efficacy, and opportunities for participation. Multiple data collection methods were used, including focus groups with youth, interviews with key informants, and social media analytics. Research themes include 1) The Power of Music, 2) Seeking Connections, 3) Awareness ≠ Change, and 4) Searching for Solutions. Findings showed that The JFP presentation was well-received by its audiences. Awareness, the primary goal of the organization increased, yet it was evident that for behaviour change to occur a broader community-level strategy is necessary. This strategy needs to involve active participation by students, numerous follow-up strategies, and community partnerships to address contextual issues and support sustained change. Implications for practice include developing active participation and partnerships; incorporating additional interaction with youth in the school presentation program; enhancement of online and social media strategies, and the provision of lived, multi-sensory experiences, both online and in the community. This intentionally transdisciplinary research filled gaps in the literature concerning the interconnections between social engagement, the social determinants of health, and the ecosystems perspective. It was also the first body of research to propose that social engagement is an appropriate community-level social determinant of health. Originating in real world experiences, this research advances knowledge translation and exchange immediately, informing the social engagement strategies of not-for-profit organizations as they harness the energy of the arts to effect social change. / Graduate / 0413 / 0515 / 0566 / jlansfie@uvic.ca

Recent research findings have reinforced the importance of soft skills for managerialsuccess. Consequently, there is an ongoing practical need for and research interest ineffective soft skill training. In order to improve the soft skills of their employees,companies have begun to turn to performing artists in the hope of achieving a hightraining effect. While this phenomenon has created excitement, it has hardly been thesubject of serious investigation guided by research questions and executed researchmethodologies. In particular, hardly any insights exist into the exercises artists use whenproviding soft skill training and coaching for a business audience. In order to exploresuch activities in a systematic way, this thesis turns the attention to the performing artshigher education curriculum for identifying relevant exercise categories and for linkingthem to soft skills. This is accomplished through in-depth interviews conducted withclassical singing and drama teachers in Germany. In order to achieve a transfer to thebusiness world, HR representatives from German-based management consulting firmsare also questioned through in-depth interviews in order to explore relevant soft skillsaddressable by performing arts interventions. The results show transfer links betweeneight performing arts curriculum items and seven soft skill categories. Apart fromexploring the relationship between arts-based exercises and managerial soft skills, theresearch results confirm the benefit rationale for arts-based training and highlightsuccess factors. The outcomes are visualised in a suggestive model aimed at providing asystematic orientation for arts-based trainers and for organisations considering soft skilltraining based on the performing arts. However, the research has also limitations,especially a too conservative number of connections between performing arts curricularitems and soft skill categories. Other limitations include a regional and cultural focus onGermany, as well as the reduction of arts-based training activities to the boundaries offormal performing arts education. These shortcomings are used for motivating futureresearch.

This thesis portfolio presents an autoethnographic account of a prison educator engaged in a research project that explores creative approaches to arts, prison education, work and training in custodial settings. The position of the researcher is located in-between and across professional practices including arts in prisons, prison education, work and training environments, which have conflicting agendas that, nevertheless, share the same institutional space. Policymakers and management bodies regulating these professional practices expect education and training to contribute to reducing reoffending. Procedurally, the research process was precariously balanced between, on the one hand, performing to measures of quality based on the requirement to reduce recidivism, and on the other, crude outcome measures driven by a utilitarian marketization of prison education that includes course completion rates calculated on the basis of minimum contact time. This broader context created an uncertain and constantly shifting context for the research, which began with my search for an effective creative practice in a Performing Arts Department (PAD) and ends in a Functional English classroom (FEC). Conceptually, the research draws on the What Works debate (McGuire, 1995; Brayford et al. 2010), which continues to create a disjuncture between policy and implementation resulting from unrealistic assumptions that arts and education programmes in prison might prevent reoffending, with evidence relying solely upon randomisation, reductive causation and numerical calculation. It also draws on desistance theory (Maruna, 2001; McNeil, 2006), which argues that desistance from crime can be understood as an indirect process, rather than an event. From an examination of my efforts to implement and develop creative approaches to education via autoethnographic tools, including fictional performative writing, I argue two main points. Firstly, the autonomy required by the creative prison educator engaged in an advanced research project re-positions the professional in a particular relationship with the bewildering processes of power, protectionism and performance management in the criminal justice system. Secondly, and as demonstrated through fictional performative writing, I argue that research methods engaging voices from the frontline of educational environments, can reveal seemingly small details relating to the challenges and possibilities of creative education in prisons that, nonetheless, have significant implications for developing productive and innovative approaches to desistance from crime. Moreover, from this grounded, yet restricted position, I speculate how such approaches might extend both creativity and creatively beyond the validation of this doctorate qualification.

This study analyzes young women’s descriptions and conceptualizations of cyberviolence and cyberbullying, including how they both challenge and reify mainstream cyberbullying discourses. The central themes analyzed include the way(s) in which self-representation in social networking sites are constrained through the limited options young women describe as being available for self-expression in these spaces, how notions of publicity, privacy and context-specific communication in social networking sites factor in girls’ descriptions of platform architecture, and how platform architecture often amplifies cyberviolence. Finally, the study unpacks the reasons that young women offer to explain why adults are often so out of touch when it comes to understanding cyberbullying and its relationship to young people’s digital culture. This dissertation contributes to cyberviolence studies, feminist new media, and girls’ digital culture studies, and has relevance for critical feminist criminology, by centring the voices of young women in order to investigate cyberviolence through participatory video with a sizable number of young women. The findings are based on data collected through eight participatory video workshops, two co-produced short documentaries and six focus groups with one hundred and twelve (N=112) participants in total under the larger umbrella study “Cyber & Sexual Violence: Helping Communities Respond” (2013-2016). This project was a community partnership between the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal and the TAG Lab at Concordia University, and was funded by Status of Women Canada. I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that puts feminist new media studies, feminist approaches to online misogyny and girls’ digital culture studies into conversation with the extant literature on cyberbullying and cyberviolence. This theoretical approach is used to examine how the social norms in the discourse communities of social networking sites that girls outline in their descriptions of cyberviolence are structured through age-old misogynistic myths and impossible contradictions around femininity. Employing a participatory arts-based feminist lens allowed me to invite participants to share their perspectives in an accessible and fun way while examining their work through qualitative thematic analysis. Among the many findings this research produced, three key themes extend as threads that run throughout the dissertation. First, my participants did not relate to the term ‘cyberbullying’ in the way that adults often use it. While researchers and policy-makers continue to debate how to define cyberviolence and cyberbullying, participant responses illustrated the need for more dialogue around the toxic social norms and assumptions that currently structure young people’s digital culture, mainstream cyberbullying debates and anti-cyberbullying programming. Secondly, young women’s focus on issues of publicity versus privacy, anonymity, and peer surveillance highlights both the nuances that girls’ voices contribute to ongoing cyberbullying debates and how social networking sites amplify age-old double standards facing women and girls in visual culture and the public sphere. Finally, the themes of empathy and education that emerged from participants’ suggestions for strategies with which to address cyberviolence underscore the systemic changes that will be necessary in tackling the continually evolving and widespread phenomenon of cyberviolence. Participants conceptualize cyberviolence and cyberbullying as existing along a continuum of daily interactions in social networking sites that include encountering everything from mean jokes to sexual violence.

The purpose of this study was to begin constructing an expanded framework for child literacy learning with participants who educate children in formal and informal settings in literacy, the arts and environmental education. The study explored how a broader framework for child literacy learning could gain strength and purpose from our increasingly diverse and complex social environment. I used participatory arts-based research to spark dialogue and foster partnerships. The design of the study was intended to demonstrate how the arts, in this case photography, can be effective as a means of attending, exploring, and communicating ideas. Three major themes emerged: Child Literacy Practices and how they can attend to belonging and voice; Arts and Culture and the engagement of children in the arts and how this is relevant to child literacy learning ;and Environmental Destruction looking towards preparing children to be ecologically literate in the context of child literacy learning. / Graduate

Multiliteracies theory extends the notion of literacy well beyond the traditional linear text-based definition of reading and writing (New London Group, 1996). It addresses the saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity and the multiplicity of communication channels and media available in our rapidly changing world. Multiliteracies involve engagement with multiple design modes, linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal being a combination of the different modes. This research emerged from the need to open a space for students in an international languages school teaching Arabic language to engage in creative, aesthetic, alternative, and multimodal forms of literacy that involve the integration of the various semiotic resources in their meaning-making and design of texts. It is about a lived teaching-learning journey that draws on the concept of living pedagogy and dwelling in the in-between spaces of curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-live(d) (Aoki, 1991). In this research journey, I share the possibilities that opened up when students between the age of eleven and fourteen years old engaged with multiliteracies in an international languages classroom that teaches heritage language. This research journey also presents how the participative type of inquiry and collaboration between the researcher and classroom teacher contributed to the enhancement of their knowledge and learning about multiliteracies practices. After listening to and discussing a literary text presented by the teacher, students responded by creating their own texts to show their understanding of the narrative genre. They produced multimodal arts-based (Barton, 2014; Sanders & Albers, 2010) and digital based texts (Knobel & Lankshear, 2013). Through a multiliteracies/multimodalities theoretical, epistemological, and methodological perspective (Albers, 2007; Jewitt & Kress, 2008; Morawski, 2012; Rowsell, 2013), and drawing from approaches such as participatory action research (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013), and bricolage (Kincheloe, 2004), I developed this research story through a process of braiding and interweaving of various modes of texts and genres to produce a métissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009) of the live(d) narratives of my research praxis. This inquiry offers a glimpse as to how opening the space for creative approaches in the teaching of literacy engages students in the design of texts using both linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic resources and incorporating multiple modes of representation from which they produce arts, digital, and multimodal texts.

Art has a long and nuanced history within the context of the prison. Prisoners have utilized wall drawings, tattooing, journaling, and other forms of creative expression to break the monotony of prison life. Over time, art has evolved in the prison context and has been utilized by researchers, therapists, and teachers as a method of rehabilitation that falls outside of more conventional methods such as talk therapy, drug treatment, and anger management programs. Arts programming allows prisoners to express themselves in new and creative ways, as well as the ability to build new skills and foster better relationships with themselves and each other. A review of the literature discusses the negative effects of imprisonment on the body. As a result of the violent and incapacitating nature of being caged, prisoners become mirrors of the carceral space. Bodies become rigid, condensed, hunched, or even bulky in order to survive. Dance is an opportunity for prisoners to find freedom within the walls of a prison, as well as more tangible benefits such as improving posture, flexibility, and giving prisoners new ways to express themselves through movement. This can lead to improved self-esteem, a sense of accomplishment, and fostering better relationships with themselves and others. Using Foucault’s concept of docile bodies as well as Goffman’s theory dramaturgy, this research serves to fill in gaps in the literature around how dance impacts the body and emotional well-being. Through one-on-one interviews with members of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, this paper will examine dance’s ability to free the body and help prisoners find a sense of belonging and identity unrelated to their criminality.

This dissertation is about new materialism as it relates to art education. It is a speculative inquiry that seeks to illuminate the interconnectivity of things by considering the ways in which things participate in generative practices of perceiving and making. To do so, the dissertation pioneers an arts-based methodology that allows for broad considerations about who and what can be considered an agent in the process of art making. In this inquiry, the researcher is an artist-participant with other more-than-human and human participants to construct an (im)material autohistoria-teoría, a revisionist interdisciplinary artwork inspired by the work of Anzaldúa. The term w/e is developed and discussed as new language for expanding upon Braidotti's posthumanist subjectivity. New theories called thing(k)ing (including found poetry) and (im)materiality are discussed as movements towards better understanding the contributions of the more-than-human in artmaking practices.