Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) is a collaborative arts-based research project on the experiences that support workers have with enacting support, care and education practices in the disability support and education field. Five support workers were interviewed using arts-based and collaborative methods. Conversations focused on the disciplining power that policies, systems and structures have over the support practices provided to young people labeled with an intellectual disability. Questions were formulated on support worker experiences with enacting care, behaviour support, and curriculum. The following four issues were central to the inquiry: child development and the pressure for language acquisition; issues of consent in everyday practice and clinical spaces; the creation and enactment of behaviour plans; and disability labels and the diagnosis process. The in-depth, unstructured arts-based individual and group conversations were collaboratively designed with research participants, and topics of care, support and professional ethics were intentionally politicized. Conversations took place during the creation of poetry, painting and collage to grapple with practitioners’ own power in shaping the worlds of young people. By way of experimenting with diffractive approaches to analysis, assemblages of poetry, art and theory were created as thresholds for entry into the larger thesis assemblage. Transcripts and art were analyzed while thinking with various theoretical threads from critical disability studies, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and social justice, with the purpose of blurring and resisting harmful and normative support practices. This study shows that support workers are honouring the bodies and communications of resistance of the young people with disabilities they support. This study also shows support workers as deeply self-reflexive as they engage in critical practices in resistance to ableism. Dream/Hope/Love/Create/Act (and back) has implications for informing research, training and education that grow support work practices to become increasingly consensual and designed with and for young people with a variety of disability labels. / Graduate

In this thesis, I reflect on the ethical and theoretical foundations of researching (and re-searching) sexualized violence with Indigenous girls in remote communities in northern British Columbia, Canada, through a project called Sisters Rising, an Indigenous-led, community-based research study focused on centering Indigenous teachings related to sovereignty and gender well-being. Through an emergent methodology drawing from witnessing and borderland feminisms to conduct arts- and land-based workshops with girls and community members, I sought to unsettle my relationships as a diasporic frontline worker to the communities and lands I work with. To disrupt traditional hegemonic discourses of settler colonialism, I look to arts-based and collective witnessing, reflecting on how alternative, safer spaces for Indigenous girls can be created for resistance and (re)storying connections to land and relationships. / Graduate / 2020-09-12

<p>The purpose of the present study was to evaluate a day ward treatment program for eating disorders by examining the patients' expectations and experiences of treatment. Previous research suggests that patients' expectations are important variables to be considered in the treatment of eating disorders as they have shown to influence treatment outcome in various ways. The present study included 38 patients who had completed the day ward treatment and fulfilled the criteria for either anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or eating disorder-not otherwise specified. Data was collected using the self report questionnaire Eating Disorder Patients' Expectations and Experiences of Treatment (ED-PEX) which measures patients' expectations prior to treatment as well as their experiences directly after treatment termination. Data was also collected using ten half-structured interviews which were held 3-18 months post treatment. Diagnosis criteria were used to assess the treatment outcome. At treatment termination 23 of 38 patients were diagnosis free. The results indicated that the control-focused interventions were most helpful according to the patients. It was also revealed that the patients desired more specific information about the purpose of the treatment components prior to, as well as during, the treatment process.</p>

This qualitative study draws on the traditions of narrative inquiry and arts-based research to explore the intricate puzzle of the experience of writing in a grade nine English Language Arts classroom, with a particular group of participants engaged in a creative autobiographical writing project. This case study of a small rural classroom, where 10 of 12 students participated as writers in the research, explores both the teachers and the students experiences. As a participant-researcher, I designed a three-cycle writing project spanning nine weeks, where all participants engaged in conversations about writing. One specific feature of the classroom setting was that both the teacher and the researcher were themselves active writers and deliberately and systematically offered stories of their own writing practice as part of the teaching about writing process, while undertaking the same writing tasks as the students. The data collected and analyzed in this dissertation includes students group conversations in class time, participants drafts and final writing, entry and exit drawings of how students saw themselves as writers, and individual reflective private conversations. From this data, I created portraits of the participants as writers and of the instructional moments. The drawings which were shaped by a participants historical relationship with writing, their broader personal, social and educational context, and the study provided insight into the individuals relationship to and with writing, providing access to a participants knowledge and experience at times unavailable through more traditional forms of data. Two main themes that emerged were resistance to writing and students complex relationship with revision. Their resistance manifested itself in a variety of forms, including one instance of plagiarism and a total absence of writing with another. An exploration of revision practices revealed a tangled process that often failed to improve the quality of students writing, where revision became, for example, a matter of excision with the delete key or serial first drafting. This study complicates the common school use of autobiographical writing prompts, by documenting the many forms of participant resistance and task subversion. Further, the interpretation of autobiographical as necessarily entailing only the true proved an area of tension.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate a day ward treatment program for eating disorders by examining the patients' expectations and experiences of treatment. Previous research suggests that patients' expectations are important variables to be considered in the treatment of eating disorders as they have shown to influence treatment outcome in various ways. The present study included 38 patients who had completed the day ward treatment and fulfilled the criteria for either anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or eating disorder-not otherwise specified. Data was collected using the self report questionnaire Eating Disorder Patients' Expectations and Experiences of Treatment (ED-PEX) which measures patients' expectations prior to treatment as well as their experiences directly after treatment termination. Data was also collected using ten half-structured interviews which were held 3-18 months post treatment. Diagnosis criteria were used to assess the treatment outcome. At treatment termination 23 of 38 patients were diagnosis free. The results indicated that the control-focused interventions were most helpful according to the patients. It was also revealed that the patients desired more specific information about the purpose of the treatment components prior to, as well as during, the treatment process.

This dissertation examines how teachers understand and use their own bodies in their everyday practice of teaching. Using a poststructural theoretical framework and an ethnographic and arts-based research methodology, I demonstrate how discourses of the body shape experiences of teaching and teachers’ lives. This work is significant not only because it has direct implications for teachers but also because teachers’ bodies are rich and complex sites for theorizing and thinking critically about contemporary practices and discursive understandings that shape our lives. I call the research methodology that I used in this study “embedded performed ethnography”. This methodology involved in-depth ethnographic interviews, creative writing, and dramatic performance with twelve teachers in Ontario. By drawing on three distinct but interrelated fields: critical physical education, feminist and queer curriculum theory and Fat Studies, my research demonstrates the richness and complexity of teachers’ professional lives and the impact that dominant discourses of the body have on educational spaces. I use three key concepts to analyze the experiences and writing of the research participants. First, I use the concept of ‘biopedagogy’ to examine the ways in which teachers’ bodies are subject to regulation and policing in schools. Next, I use the concept of ‘performance’ to examine how participants use their bodies to construct and reproduce dominant notions of health in the classroom. Lastly, I use ‘affect’ as a concept to address the complex and complicated moments that occur on and through a teacher’s body in the classroom. I work with the everyday experiences of teachers in the classroom to explore how particular teaching moments illustrate and connect to the broader discourses and practices of the body that shape our lives.

I den här uppsatsen i ämnet bildpedagogik förenas konst, natur och frågan om hållbar utveckling. Uppsatsens utgångspunkt är att miljöfrågor är aktuella i vår tid. Barn som växer upp idag lever främst i urbana miljöer med liten naturkontakt. I uppsatsen beskrivs att naturkontakten tycks kunna ha betydelse för miljöengagemang. Genom intervjuer med forskare, konstnärer och lärare undersöks frågan om konstbaserat lärande tillsammans med fördjupad naturkontakt kan lyfta miljöfrågor. Intervjusvaren visar varierande exempel på hur detta kan se ut. Exempelvis beskrivs hur man kan fördjupa sitt seende genom konstnärligt arbete i naturen och bli mer sensitiv för den. Resultatet av intervjuerna tolkas mot en litteraturbakgrund som bla beskriver utomhuspedagogik, naturkontaktens idéhistoria samt nutida konstinriktningar som ryms inom begreppet ”Environmental art”. Där lyfts miljöfrågor fram och skapandet är platsrelaterat och utgår från naturmaterial. Några av de intervjuade framhåller också möjligheten att bearbeta känslor och hantera paradoxer kring miljöfrågor med hjälp av konstnärligt skapande.

This dissertation is an a/r/tographic inquiry (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) that explores postmodern picturebooks and writing theory. Postmodern picturebooks have been described as texts that blur traditional literary boundaries and text-image relationships, while employing devices like metafiction and playfulness (Goldstone, 2002; Sipe, 2008). As meaning becomes more ambiguous, readers are positioned as co-constructors of meaning (Serafini, 2005). Research has shown students enjoy reading postmodern picturebooks and constructing meaningful transactions despite the complex nature of these texts (McGuire, Belfatti, & Ghiso, 2008; Pantaleo, 2004, 2007, 2008), but few have begun to explore how these texts are written. Therefore, I used a/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) to theorize about the relationship between these texts and what it means to write. As a method of inquiry, a/r/tography is an arts-based approach to research that is interested in how artistic practices produce meaning and a/r/tographers use art to “construct the very ‘thing’ [they] are attempting to make sense of” (Springgay, 2008, p. 159). In this study, I wrote and illustrated a postmodern picturebook and interpreted how this experience generated understandings about what it means to write. In response to the process model of writing (Flower & Hayes, 1981), the data led to representations that offer new perspectives on contemporary writing theory, in particular, the interpretive, public, and situated nature of writing (Kent, 1999). As a result, I use theories of metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003; Lakoff & Turner, 1989) to critique writing process theory (Elbow, 1973, 1981; Flower & Hayes, 1981) and propose that a/r/tographic inquiry creates openings for new possibilities within the post-process movement (Kent, 1999) by demonstrating how a writer’s evolving questions (Irwin & Springgay, 2008) relate to writing pedagogy.

This case study investigates how a situated learning model can contribute to positive youth development as seen through a youth focused, community-based arts program, Creative Teen. Creative Teen is a seven-month collaborative mentorship program, which pairs twelve professional artists with twelve high school students. The partnerships work together one-on-one over the course of the program to become more knowledgeable on a given art medium and to ultimately collaborate on an artwork for the culminating Creative Teen exhibition. I sought to determine how this mentorship model would not only foster artistic development amongst youth, but how participation in the Creative Teen program would contribute to the overall development of the young adults involved. I accomplished this by limiting observational research and supplemental interviews to the interactions of one mentor partnership, Jessica and Carly. Over the course of the program, I attended their weekly meetings and watched them as they worked together to develop a large-scale installation, Lydia the Tattooed Ladies, for the culminating exhibition. Initially it was unclear to me the extent to which involvement in the Creative Teen program would have on the development of youth participants. However, through conducting this case study, I was able to identify various developmental characteristics that were cultivated through participation, which include artistic, social, and professional development. In addition to personal developmental characteristics, many practical skills were developed and exercised during the course of the Creative Teen program, which include time management, communication, financial management, public speaking, commitment to a long term project, and working with others. / text

The purpose of this dissertation was to examine how I can facilitate experiences with art that promote "productive ambiguity," or the ability to transform tensions that disrupt our current understandings into opportunities for personal growth. Ambiguity becomes productive when our encounters with difference stimulate curiosity, imagination, and consideration of new possibilities and perspectives. While employing a multi-methods practitioner inquiry that combined elements of action research, autoethnography and arts based research, I addressed the following questions with a voluntary group of fifth grade research participants: How can I facilitate experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity? How do my students interact with the various visual content and instructional strategies that I develop and implement? How might these interactions inform my future teaching practice, and how does my own reflective visual journaling process inform my research? In addition to employing reflective sketching to document and analyze data, I also presented research findings in the form of a visual research narrative. My analysis of research findings produced the following teaching strategies for facilitating meaningful experiences with art that promote productive ambiguity: (a) Use an inquiry approach to instruction as much as possible in order to position students to actively navigate the space between the known and unknown while seeking fresh understandings rather than passively accepting new information. (b) Explore how new concepts or themes relate to students' lives in order to situate unknowns in relation to their present knowns. (c) Aim to balance structure, flexibility and accountability while developing and implementing curricula. This promotes productive ambiguity as both teachers and students negotiate their pre-conceived ideas or plans and push themselves to respond to challenges encountered within their immediate environment. (d) In order to avoid unnecessary confusion, explicitly state that students should takes risks while generating new ideas rather than identifying a pre-existing solution. (e) Finally, ask students to identify why skills and knowledge generated during these activities are valuable in order to promote meta-cognition of how this ambiguous space can become more productive. In addition to these practical findings, research participants agreed that sharing their interpretations of visual phenomena with one another enabled them to understand each other better. I also discovered the ways in which productive ambiguity emerged in the spaces in between my teacher/researcher/artist roles when I perceived challenges as prospects for personal transformation. As a whole, this dissertation exhibited how relational aesthetics and arts based research theories translated into my elementary art classroom practice while simultaneously integrating these concepts into the research study design and presentation.