In the years since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, American art museums have increased attempts to address the racial inequities that persist in the field. These inequities impact all aspects of museum work, not least of which education. Because museum educators are often seen as the conduit between museum collections and audiences, the work of implementing anti-racist programming often falls to them. However, the museum education field is majority White, and while there is a rich body of literature treating the adverse impacts of Whiteness on classroom teaching practices, very little exists on how Whiteness might manifest in gallery teaching practices specifically for White museum educators. Utilizing participatory action research, practitioner inquiry, and a White affinity group model, this qualitative study explores aspects of Whiteness that impact the gallery teaching practices of four White museum educators. Our research questions seek to understand better how Whiteness manifests in our teaching specifically in the context of single visit field trips, how those impacts might shift depending on the racial demographics of the groups we are teaching, what questions come for us as a White practitioner-researcher group dedicated to undermining Whiteness in our teaching, and how, if at all, does participation in such a study impact how we think about and implement anti-racist teaching in our practice. As per the research traditions guiding this study, I treated myself as a participant alongside three other White museum educators, and together as a practitioner inquiry group we co-generated our research questions and agreed to our research methods. These included the formation of a digital space in which we could communicate with each other, observations of our teaching, reflective writing responding to the observations, and conversations in the digital space based on these writings. This period of data generation was followed by interviews between myself and each participant as well as a focus group with all of us. Findings surfaced various avoidance techniques we each employed in our teaching to avoid race talk or push our anti-racist teaching more deeply. Our avoidance pointed to perceived tensions we felt between our trainings and the demands of anti-racist teaching, as well as the limitations of the single visit field trip model. Findings also surfaced anxiety when discussing Blackness in particular, as well as problematic assumptions about both White students and students of color we work with. Analysis of these findings provide insights into the ways art museum pedagogies in addition to critical emotional pedagogies might be deployed towards anti-racist teaching, as well as the emotional qualities of naming and dismantling Whiteness as White practitioners. While the findings are limited to the four museum educator participants and the specific contexts in which we work, this study points to ways we might begin to develop deeper understandings of how Whiteness might impact gallery teaching practices. More importantly, in the tradition of practitioner inquiry, this study raises important questions around how visitors of color experience Whiteness in museum education programs, how professional development might be reimagined for museum educators, as well as ways to rethink the traditional single visit field trip model to better accommodate anti-racist learning goals.

How does it feel to be creative? Such a question, when approached from a phenomenological perspective, reveals new understandings about the embodied experience of creativity, and how it feels as it is being lived. This investigation begins with a provocative contrast of two environments where creativity is thought to manifest itself: school art classrooms, where creativity is often legislated from an authority figure, and New Orleans Second Line parades, where creativity is organically and kinetically expressed. A thorough review of the literature on creativity focuses on education, arts education, creative economies, psychology, and critical theorists, collectively revealing a cognitive bias and striking lack of consideration for community, freedom, and the lived experience of being creative. Further discussions in the literature also neglect sites of creativity, and the impact that place (such as a school classroom) can have upon creativity. The phenomenological perspectives of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Bachelard, and Trigg support a methodological lens to grasp embodied knowledge, perceptions of placedness on creativity, and the interdependent frictions between freedom, authenticity, movement and belonging. The research method includes investigations in New Orleans in archives, examination of visual and material culture, participation in cultural practice, and formal and informal interviews. Further, the phenomena of walking and wandering became a methodology for embodied data collection that clarified the emerging rich experiences and descriptions of how it feels to be creative, especially how it feels to be creative in a creative place. What is also revealed are intense frictions, such as the tension between perceptions of personal freedom and a high demand for authenticity in terms of New Orleans traditions, that opens the space and fuels the inspiration for the abundance of creativity found in New Orleans culture.

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, works of art explored social isolation, abolition, and climate crisis. The pandemic had ruptured normative curricular practices in schools and learning discourses focused on minimizing those interruptions. Meanwhile, works such as Ellen Reid’s SOUNDWALK, Kamau Ware’s Fighting Dark, and Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest crafted relationships to knowledge through site-specific sounds, familiar materials, and sensory experiences of their environments. A group of curriculum designers, researchers, and educators, including the author of this study, affiliated with a university-based Curriculum Lab engaged with these artworks, while processing the pandemic’s effects on their own curricular practices. Situated within the Lab, this project used ethnographic and speculative methods to research how the artworks’ aesthetic and sensory strategies activated curricular contact zones and contributed to artful practices for curriculum theory and design. This study built on the work of critical curriculum scholarship which has demonstrated that significant forms of knowledge and belonging are produced through informal and null curriculum, and outside of schools entirely. Drawing on aesthetics, affect, and vital materialisms, this study theorized ambient curriculum: a surround through which any variety of onto-epistemological practices might cohere into relationships of knowing and becoming. At the same time, this study recognized that formal curriculum exerts a large influence on the daily lives of teachers and students, and that there are educators searching for forms of curriculum more aligned to their commitments to social and ecological justice; beliefs about the complexity of knowledge and learning; and approach to design as a creative process. This project considers the implications of such creative processes for curriculum design as a nomadic practice and curriculum designers as nomadic becomings, making and made by their creations.

This dissertation is a phenomenological study on the origin of expressive arts as an innate human need rooted deeply in the psyche in order to grasp and relate to the human condition. Carl Gustav Jung said, “Life has no rules and that is its mystery.” Art compensates for the chaos that originates and often rules life. The history of art and its evolution in society was explored to paint a picture of the experiences that dominate and leave permanent etchings of the complexities, attachments, and traumas on the psyche. I explored the history of art and its ability to stimulate curiosities, discoveries, and learning. Additionally, I followed the birth of art education and its crossroads within the discovery of the unconscious mind and Jungian psychology. I followed the effects of the unconscious mind and psychology on art and art education, the ecological agents of the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the middle class, and the new accessibility of art. I also discussed the Industrial Revolution and its impact on pushing the artist to new interior boundaries of altered states and the birth of abstract art. Moreover, I looked at expressive art, painting, poetry, and sculpture as the foreground to discover the psychic energy and complexes that stimulate and inspire the artist. I presented eight artist interviews randomly chosen from different backgrounds, specialties, and age. The data analysis process allowed me to gain insights into the artists’ perceptions of how art has enriched the development of their psyches and their lives.

Founded in 1892, the Portland Art Association (PAA) served as Oregon's and the Pacific Northwest's leading visual arts institution for almost a century. While the Association formally dissolved in 1984, its legacy is felt strongly today in the work of its successor organizations, the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Emerging during a period of considerable innovation in and fervent advocacy for the arts across America, the Association provided the organizational network and resources around which an energetic and diverse group of city leaders, civic reformers and philanthropists, as well as artists and art educators, coalesced. This thesis describes the collaboration among arts and civic advocates under the banner of aesthetic education during the Association's first four decades. Though art education continued to be critically important to the organization after 1932, the year the Association opened its new Museum, art was no longer conceived of as an instrument for improving general community life and programs focused on more specialized, fine arts-related activities.

This study concerned the methods in which fourth and fifth grade teachers in one of the larger suburbs of Dallas, Texas, prepared themselves and their classes for a visit to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Twenty teachers who had visited the Dallas museum in the last two years were interviewed using a validated interview questionnaire. The majority of teachers were concerned with both visual and written resources. Although, additional materials were requested, many teachers were uniformed about preparation resources provided by the museum. The teachers' idea and attitudes were found to be supportive of the museum and its programs.

The purpose of the investigation was to collect information from ninety representative art museums in Europe and North America, with visits made to forty-five and a validated questionnaire sent to the others; to study their research-oriented publications as to contents; and to organize the data so that they would be of value to graduate art students. Although this information will be of value to scholars, undergraduate students, and museum personnel, the study was restricted to the graduate art student because some museum libraries restrict their facilities to this educational level.

The purpose of this study was to examine and evaluate the perceptions of high school art teachers, parents of high school students and high school students themselves relative to the merits of goals of a district program for high school art education and to determine whether the three populations share a common perception of these goals. The reveiew of the literature indicated a lack of substantive art programs in the curriculum from kindergarten through grade 12. The emphasis on art productino goals was cited as a major reason art is given such low status in our nation's schools. Many authors believe that if art is to be valued as fundamental to a child's educational development, the emphasis on art production must be broadened to include art hsitory, critique and aesthetics. Because an official school curriculum is often established to reflect societal values, information on art teachers', parents' and students' perceptions of the merits of the goals of high school art programs is important. Such information can be used to plan a local strategy for generating support for and effecting a change in art curriculum. Twenty-two certified high school art teachers, 200 randomly selected parents and a representative sample of 240 high school students were asked to review a list of 20 goals for a high school art education program and to rate them on a seven point Likert scale. for the three groups included The survey instruments five art activities pertaining to each of the four major goal areas of the discipline-based art curriculum, namely art production, art history, critique and aesthetics. Seventy percent of the participants responded to the questionnaires. The objectives of this study were (1) to determine the variability of perception between and within each group, (2) to find whether the three groups possess common perceptions of the merits of alternative goals, (3) to ascertain whether art teachers with more than five years experience share a common perception with teachers with less than five years experience, (4) to determine whether students who have received secondary level art instruction differ in their perceptions from students who have not received instruction, and (5) to compare the ratings of production oriented goals with the other discipline-based art education goals. Major findings of the study were as follows: (1) The plot fo the mean ratings of the merit of the goals for teachers shows wider variability than either parents or students. (2) Students provided a lower mean rating than either the teacher or parent groups. (3) Lack of data. (4) Students and parents with more exposure to secondary art education tended to rate the goals lower than their counterparts with no art background. (5) In the One-Sample Runs test, the art production goals did not appear more predominant at one end of the list of rankings. Teachers, parents and students rated aesthetics and criticism moderately high. In conclusion, the findings indicate that teachers, parents and students do value critique and aesthetic goals in the high school art education curriculum. Continued in-depth research and study with wider populations will be beneficial if we are to meet the challenge to continue to broaden high school art curriculum goals.

This study examined the influences of a variety of verbal and non-verbal strategies on the language acquisition of six fourth grade ESL students in a discipline-based art education classroom. The art teacher/researcher spoke only English, and the students spoke Spanish almost exclusively. The art instruction occurred during eighteen 30 minute sessions, over a period of five months. The program involved the whole language approach, collaborative/cooperative learning, and the study of art concepts through verbal and graphic symbol cue cards and images of art works. Data were amassed from transcripts of video recordings, student and teacher interviews, and reflective notes. This study showed highly successful results with student growth in language acquisition and comprehension of art concepts.

Care can be defined as a set of relational practices that foster mutual recognition, growth, protection, empowerment, and human community, among others (Gordon et al., 1996). This study investigates the practices of care in the context of the curatorial creation of collaborative arts engagements. The recent proliferation of partnerships between artists and communities has revealed that, in some instances, such relationships have not been productive or supportive. This raises questions about how curators and artists embed ethical commitments into their planning and whether their relational practices foster care. Informed by Ethics of Care theory, Relational Aesthetics, and feminist scholarship as derived from the fields of leadership, psychology, and higher education, an interview-based cross-case approach was utilized to examine the Ethics of Care praxis within participatory art engagements. Six art practitioners were interviewed for this study to reveal their common experiences relating to care and explore how this relates to the background and curatorial work of the researcher. Data were collected through interviews and the researchers’ photographic reflection journal. It is argued that the findings expand the definition of ethical, collaborative relations within artistic co-creations. They also highlight the need to embrace discomfort, set boundaries to inform reciprocity, and provide a sense of belonging within Holistic Communities of Practitioners.