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No description available.

<p> A quazi-experimental, one-group, pretest/posttest study was conducted with a group of 25 hospice workers employed by a medium sized county hospice organization in the southeastern United States that was experiencing rapid personnel turn-over. Participants in the study included a doctor, a physician&rsquo;s assistant, a nurse practitioner, a massage therapist, a grief counselor, a licensed practical nurse, a certified nursing assistant, two clergy, three administrative staff, three social workers, seven volunteers, eight registered nurses and one other. The purpose was to investigate whether attending four 1-hour art therapy sessions could help reduce stress and thereby Burnout. Stamm&rsquo;s (2010) Professional Quality of Life theory was utilized to frame the study and Stamm&rsquo;s ProQOL-5 was used as both pretest and posttest. The ProQOL-5 tested three elements of Stamm&rsquo;s theory which cannot be combined: Compassion Satisfaction, Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress, and a paired sample t-test were applied to each element. No statistical differences were found between pretest and posttest scores on the ProQOL-5 in the areas of Compassion Satisfaction and Secondary Traumatic Stress. Interestingly, posttest scores on the ProQOL-5 went up instead of down significantly, after participants received four 1-hour sessions of art therapy. No quantitative evidence was found to support the use of art therapy to reduce Burnout and increase Compassion Satisfaction and Secondary Traumatic Stress. There were some minor qualitative data to indicate art therapy was helpful in reducing stress at least temporarily. More investigation needs to be done in order to develop evidence-based interventions to relieve stress and reduce Burnout in hospice/palliative care workers as the field is growing rapidly.</p>

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<p> This thesis investigates how my representations of experience through arts-informed autoethnographic research are significant in establishing the pedagogical nature of place. I seek to understand how <i>place-conscious education</i> in a community setting can encourage students&rsquo; relationships with the spaces they inhabit and lend to a more just learning environment. Many educative tools are provided and analyzed which are derived from <i> wayfinding</i> and <i>psychogeographic</i> methods. Data was collected over two months throughout the Summer of 2015 while participating in the Onward Israel service learning program in Israel and Palestine. My digital photographs and excerpts of stream-of-consciousness style poetry serve as the data set to illuminate the rich sensory encounters and art making processes indicative of experiential learning.</p><p> This context-driven artwork encourages questions and dialogue about sociopolitical conflict and wars, migration and occupation. It is concerned with physical as well as psychological borders, checkpoints and boundaries. I utilized poetic and photographic inquiry as well as cognitive mapping to explore how concepts of <i>travel</i> are intricately linked to practices of self-reflexivity, community building and alternative curricula development outside of the formal classroom setting. This qualitative data is not a strictly defined set of interviews or statistics. Instead, vignettes of a more totalizing experience can be extracted, analyzed, dissected and/or rearranged. It is an exploration of identity, agency and untraditional ways of knowing the self/Other. I underscore how new pathways and possibilities for teaching emerge from a greater acceptance and validation of experiential knowledge and an attuned consciousness to place.</p>

The study addressed the problem of the provision of objective measures for the arts, in order to provide information for national testing in art education. This involved the revision and testing of a developmental matrix and measure of art critical abilities, that had been devised in previous studies (Hickey, 1975; Stuart, 1989). The matrix was revised to project three operational levels of development for critical abilities, that were derived from projecting key concepts through four phases of a critical or cognitive strategy. Key concepts were projected for three art functions and contextual enquiry. The modal measure was revised to provide criteria for projecting and assessing three operational levels of development for each ability. A descriptive multi-disciplinary research strategy was used to test the objectivity of the projected matrix and measure. The testing was undertaken with thirty-one case studies derived fromjunior, middle and upper schools. The data was collected from children aged seven to eighteen years of age with three operational measuring instruments to test operational levels, reasoning and vocabulary. The objectivity of the matrix was indicated by a correspondence between Piagetian operational levels and modal reasoning for three levels of development. The objectivity of 2 the modal measure was indicated by a triangulation of operational, modal and vocabulary scores. The findings confirmed the previous testing in that the modal measure of the operational level of explanations provided an objective measure of art critical development. However, differences in the level of vocabulary and reasoning could account for a partial correspondence with concrete operational levels of development. The findings contribute to knowledge about the development of inter-disciplinary measures of the cognitive style of strategy evaluation. The information would be relevant for co-ordinating national testing in different subject areas, and for art education in particular.

<p>When children can understand their surrounding environments (whether it be the natural environment or their built environment) it is said that they can connect more deeply and have a heightened awareness of their surroundings (Kelly, 2013). This connection and heightened awareness can open their eyes to prevalent environmental issues, increasing their sense of social responsibility. The research on this type of learning generally occurs in formal institutions (i.e., a school), non-formal centers (i.e., at an outdoor education center), or informal meeting places (i.e., at a park with a parent). I conducted a primarily qualitative study?utilizing arts-based research (ABR) methods and environmental art education theory?to better understand school-aged children?s (5-10 years of age) engagement with nature during indoor nature-based art classes. I observed children within a small, mountain-town school (Kindergarten ? 5th grade) while they engaged in various artistic activities such as drawing, finger painting, and watercolor. My purpose was to gauge whether indoor nature-based art activities compelled elementary aged children to engage in meaningful conversation about nature. I assessed meaningfulness by the structure of their sentences and topics of their discussions that ensued. This assessment included looking for changes over time in students? reaction to the art they were creating and the subsequent connections they were making. Results demonstrate that students are deeply engaged in their artwork and talk mostly about memories related to nature and what aspects of nature their artwork inspires. Given that these activities provoked students to be thinking about nature, schools may want to consider conducting similar activities if they are unable to provide quality time outdoors for their students but want to help their students maintain a nature connection.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

No description available.