The purpose of this study is to investigate how the use of contemporary storytelling practice in a museum setting can successfully engage visitor voices with objects. Specifically, this research used an exploratory case study to better understand Object Stories at the Portland Art Museum. The unique attributes inherent in Object Stories make it an exemplary program to research and through which to gain understandings regarding effective contemporary storytelling techniques within a museum. The use of digital archives, the creation of a safe space, and enabling visitors to share personal stories about museum objects are some of the qualities that set Object Stories apart from other contemporary storytelling programs in the United States. Four themes emerged through interviews, observations, and the study of documents forming a rich and detailed understanding of Object Stories. These themes are found within and help elucidate the successful characteristics of Object Stories. Based on the findings of this study, museum educators can look to this interactive gallery space at the Portland Art Museum to help them develop or enhance storytelling programs, and ultimately to improve the development of empathetic connections between visitors and museum objects. / text

This study examined the impact of the arts on community development in the town of Marfa, Texas. The purpose of this study was to examine the role the arts have played and continue to play in art education and community development. To explore the impact of the arts in Marfa, forty interviews were obtained from residents of the community in the summer of 2012. Seven themes emerged from these interviews, giving insight into the impact of the arts in the community development of Marfa. These themes included: Arts Community Support, Hard Work, Discourse and the Influence of Art, Cultural Differences and Similarities, Economic Benefit of the Arts, Cultural Augmentation, and Donald Judd: The Center of Influence in my interviews. These themes presented a range of perspectives regarding the impact of the arts in this small west Texas town. / text

<p> The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine the benefits of art as a therapeutic modality for identifying stress in Gulf War to active duty veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). This is a mixed methodology study. The case and control sampling approach was a systematic random sample with a paired treatment control design. The questions where chosen to the specificity of the Gulf War veteran. The qualitative data was scrutinized using a mixed methods design utilizing the tool known as the 17 Point Questionnaire. The quantitative data was obtained using the tool known as the PSS 14 Stress Scale. Both qualitative data and quantitative data were tested for validity and reliability using various tools including Spearman&rsquo;s Rho, or (Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient), Cluster Analysis, Pearson&rsquo;s Coefficient, Dendorgrams, paired and independent T-tests, and summary statistics to determine data. Convergent validity was evaluated by comparing positive and negative PSS-14 factors and by examining relationships with the number of actual to perceived benefits of stress reduction using Likert Scale results over thirty days between two Gulf War veteran groups identified with PTSD. Findings have shown a significant reductions in stress in the treatment group. Findings have also shown significant correlations between the studies perceived benefits for specific modalities and the use of ceramic or clay work as a preferred method of choice were also identified within the research. Due to the ability of art to reduce stress in Gulf War victims suffering from PTSD, longitudinal studies have been recommended to provide art treatment therapies with conclusive evidence based research status. With this change in status it is anticipated that art therapy will have greater accessibility within the Veterans Administration (VA) system for those seeking alternative methods of treatment.</p>

<p> As communities in Bosnia have experienced genocide, the global community is in need of understanding a way toward justice by recognizing crimes against humanity to further gain insight into reconciliation and healing lives across the lifespan. Understanding intergenerational trauma among Bosnian young adults, who have experienced narratives of crimes against humanity throughout childhood and adolescence, is important for future generations in order to leave the world a better place in which to grow. Photo-voice involved the participant capturing a photo as a means for story elicitation, representation, and reflection of the Bosnian community. This visual medium provided psycho-dynamic insight into a photo-voice where participants reflected upon social needs, promoted critical dialogue, and expressed feeling empowered. As a result of the study, findings indicated from capturing photographs stimulated through narratives between Bosnian young adults shed light in understanding toward healing and communal reconciliation. The present study explored the outcomes through which trauma of one-generation impacts on subsequent generations. The study captured a visual phenomenon, a photo-voice and further examined subjective experiences, beliefs, and perceptions of Bosnian young adults in a post-war society.</p>

This study examines how two community art programs in Brazil have empowered participants through art practice. The programs are contextualized historically and theoretically to address how program participants from varying social, cultural, and economic backgrounds, are prepared to be responsible world citizens. / text

<p> Integrated art curriculum is established in many school programs as a vital addition to curriculum design in the arts. When utilized as tools for learning and growing, model programs contain key elements that provide insights into how children function in a variety of educational settings. Based on the success of an innovative integrated art program in a rural school district, the following dissertation unpacks the specific elements that contribute to its success and relates their applicability as motivational tools. Through focus on the processes of evidence-based decision-making for program development and the experiences of the art educator, the students and the school-wide community, the integrated art program is examined as it evolved as a leader in creating philosophical change towards collaborative practice. Rationale is then provided for the use of visual art as an intervention component in the school&rsquo;s alternative education model. The development of an art intervention program called Studio Express is introduced and highlights the strategic processes by which art may be used as a means of positive self-expression for the student at-risk in the public school setting. Evidence is also provided that supports expressive art making processes as an aide in the development of positive self-leadership qualities in diverse student populations. The sustainability of such leadership art programs is implied through the further teaching of their development to post-secondary education students.</p>

This study is an experiment in landscape art where artists put large pieces of fabric in personally significant places to be marked by the land. Landscape art is a site of power that can challenge embedded assumptions regarding national identity within tensions among local, national, and global scales. This research ruptures the Canadian myth of wilderness nation through the creation of an alternative landscape art that is informed by a theoretical discourse on the threshold as a site of difference and of learning. Inspired by the creative processes of the participating artists, Peter von Tiesenhausen, Pat Beaton, and Robert Dmytruk, I consider pedagogical implications for art education when pedagogy is structured on the powerful premise that learning is an uncertain, relational, and continual process. Using my understanding of the methodology of a/r/tography, I create and poetically analyze art that offers opportunities for personal reflection into the nature of transformative educational practices. This form of arts-based research is influenced by the notion of assemblage, as presented by Deleuze and Guattari (1984), as well as practices of narrative, action research, and autoethnography, all of which echo the research method of currere (Pinar & Grumet, 1976). Within a/r/tography, image and text are creatively juxtaposed to inspire new understandings about the pedagogical thresholds among my roles of artist, researcher, and teacher. Arguing that social change must begin from a personal awareness of one's tacit values, I posit that a/r/tography can be an educational opening into reflection of such values due to the embodied, personal nature of art-making. Through a philosophical discussion of subjectivity and community following the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacque Derrida, I take the participants' and my local, significant places as sites from which to reverse the binary of landscape and artist, following an artistic version of deconstruction. From this a/r/tographical inquiry into elements of the land that serve as structural and heuristic supports, I critique the neoliberal subject position within nationalism, education, and landscape art. I draw on understandings of identity as theorized and performed from the premise that it, like learning, is an unpredictable, relational activity of emergence that is alway slocated on the threshold of difference between one person and another. Thus, I examine the educational, ontological, and social importance of what it means to exist within community in the land. In doing so, I raise questions regarding the normative structures of our educational institutions and suggest that social transformation could begin through art practices as a creative form of pedagogy.

<p> The purpose of this study was to examine how collaborative artmaking activates and supports the development of interpersonal skills in young children. By means of a qualitative case study, this study explored how collaborative art projects engage children in using problem-solving, cooperation, and negotiation skills. Data were collected through observation of small groups of preschool children as they participated in collaborative art projects. Field notes, videotaping, small group interviews, and conversations with colleagues were the primary methods for data collection. The data were analyzed using the literature from the Reggio Emilia philosophy and research on collaborative artmaking and interpersonal skills development. Thematic groupings from both deductive and inductive coding techniques were used to analyze the data and draw inferences about the findings. Results show that children co-construct knowledge through the visual language of art during collaborative artmaking. Over time, this construction supports children in their interpersonal skill development. The art medium used in the projects and the role of teacher were examined, revealing how the children were supported in developing problem-solving, cooperation, and negotiation skills. This study makes an important contribution to the literature because it draws connections between collaborative artmaking and interpersonal skill development.</p>

<p> This critical ethnographic collective case study examined the process of becoming a teacher in the context of visual art education. This longitudinal study was grounded in larger educational concerns regarding the preparation of teachers for socially and culturally diverse U.S. public schools. This framing of teacher learning went beyond traditional dichotomies in educational research that maintain an artificial boundary between learning to teach content and learning to teach all students effectively and equitably. </p><p> In order to re-integrate the study of teacher learning, this research foregrounds the transactional relationship between a preservice art teacher&rsquo;s social locations (e.g., race, class, sex-gender, language) and how s/he makes sense of what it means to be an &ldquo;art teacher.&rdquo; Specifically, the study asked (a) how preservice art teachers negotiated their emerging art teacher identities in a university-based teacher education program, (b) how their social positions were implicated in that process, and (c) how their teacher identities were meditated by cultural narratives, artifacts, and practices. This approach eschewed simplistic and reductive analyses of teacher identities in order to attain a nuanced understanding of the multiple, sometimes contradictory social processes involved in becoming a teacher.</p><p> This collective case study centered six preservice art teachers with varied racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, all of whom attended the same undergraduate teacher education program in the southwestern U.S. Social practice theory of identity, and critical curriculum and cultural theory were employed in constructing a multi-leveled relational analysis of the commonalities and divergences in participants&rsquo; self-understandings over time.</p><p> Findings showed historical patterns of institutionalized racism, as well as complex class and sex-gendered meanings of art. These inequitable norms were reproduced in ways distinctive to the asocial and apolitical &ldquo;common sense&rdquo; knowledge that was mobilized within the world of art teacher education. Some participants experienced alienation and marginalization based on their social positioning in relation to the world of art education. The findings also illuminated the polyvalent nature of identity through the coexistence of hegemonic identities as well as counter-hegemonic agency. Implications and possibilities for generating more critical, equity-oriented teacher education and art education research, practice, and policy are considered.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between exposure to the arts and performance in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. STEAM, an integration of arts-based instruction into science and math related fields, is viewed as an alternative to traditional STEM academies. The literature briefly examines the current state of STEM programs and the deficiencies in graduate quality and quantity and the call from employers for a more innovative workforce. Advocates for STEAM argue for arts as a means to improve creativity, collaboration, risk-taking and exploration. Arguments against arts in STEM are grounded in political opinions concerning arts funding and logistical complications of implementing STEAM. However, some schools and STEM programs have embraced the STEAM premise and have begun to integrate arts into the traditional curriculum. The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) dataset was utilized to determine a correlation between the number of arts credits earned and mathematics/science achievement. Results from the NAEP dataset indicated a correlation between the amount of arts credits and increased achievement scores in science and math. The same correlation was found when controlling for demographic factors such as gender, race, and socio-economic status (SES). Overall, the arts' greatest impact was on students identified as "at-risk" or underrepresented in STEM fields. Controlling for these variable groups, one can note the quantifiable differences in scores. Overall, findings of the study provide empirical support for the addition of arts in STEM.</p>