Throughout this study, I investigate the interaction that occurs between a parent and her child when creating a collaborative drawing. The purpose of this study is to find ways in which to change common images of children and their capabilities in forming and making decisions, problem solving and communication skills, and imaginative story telling abilities. This research seeks to answer some of the following questions: In what ways are children and adults influenced by the child taking ownership of the artmaking experience and how does giving the child ownership and control over the experience change the experience for the adult? I observe two mothers as they collaborate with their young sons (ages 3 and 4) to create a drawing, discuss their experience with them and analyze their final images. Utilizing these methods, I uncover common themes and ideas about the view that adults have of children and ways of shifting these ideas of power and control over to children. I provide my recommendations and implications for the field of early childhood art education and offer a guide for parents when working with their young children.

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I began with an interest in what makes a difference for girls who face challenging circumstances: What helps them to develop sturdy, resilient, and resistant selves? What role does narrative play in this process? I set in motion a process of storytelling and reflecting by inviting girls and women to share stories together—their own stories, fictional narratives, and myths. The participants had faced particular challenges in adolescence, including economic hardship; disrupted social or family circumstances; mental health; abuse; or trauma. The girls and women had differing racialized, class, cultural, social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Drawing on the work of biblical scholars who understand Jesus’ parables as poetic metaphor, I identified 11 aspects of parables that helped me to hear and interpret girls’ stories: participation, difficulty, metaphor, fractals, truth, emergence, performance, possibility, power, wisdom, and beauty. Listening with a parabolic ear, I came to experience girls’ storytelling selves as participatory, metaphorical, fractal, truthful, and emergent; I observed girls’ selves as artistic practices that are embodied performances of their wisdom, power, and beauty. And I discovered how such performances of the self create enlarged spaces of possibility for girls in the face of life’s difficulty. I discovered that storytelling selves are girls’ power—power realized as storytelling, participation, mutual relation, meaning-making, enlarging spaces of possibility, disidentification, and embodiment. I identified six elements that seemed to be important in nurturing girls’ parabolic imagination. These are community participation, experienced observation, complexity, care, interpretation, and artmaking. These elements provide a framework for considering how educators might support girls’ selves but they do not provide a methodology. Taken together, they are more like a parable—an opening onto a particular worldview that invites participation in the world of a girl. These six elements may be signs that point to places where parables of the self are already being told. They become questions that make sense only to those who already understand: Is this community? Is anyone listening? Is it complex? Is this a place of compassion and care? Is meaning being shaped and questioned and reimagined here? Is there art? Is there play? / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2009-12-18 17:19:42.63

This study aims to explore how the art student teaching seminar can serve as a space for inquiry and reflection, and how student teachers process their experiences, negotiate personal meanings, and understand teaching complexities through inquiry based methods. The overarching question in this research study asked: How might participation in an inquiry based seminar impact the meaning student teachers make from their practicum experiences? In order to address this main question, I employed three sub-questions: How do art student teachers perceive and describe their teaching field experiences in a seminar space? What kinds of inquiry activities can facilitate reflection with art student teachers? How do art teachers relate to and value inquiry based methods of reflection?I approached these questions through a constructivist framework that supports the idea that individuals actively construct and reconstruct their own understandings, meanings, and ultimately knowledge of the world through experience and reflection upon these experiences. Utilizing a case study methodology I designed a multi-case qualitative study that aimed to interpret the student teacher seminar through the experiences of four art student teacher participants. I was the facilitator of the student teaching seminar course at a large, public university in the Southwestern United States and the art student teachers and I met roughly every two weeks, over the course of a 16 week semester, on the university campus. I implemented a scaffolded, inquiry based curriculum which offered a variety of methods aimed to encourage inquiry and promote reflection amongst student teachers. Research data consisted of seminar audio recordings, participants' written journal entries, participants' artworks, and my reflective researcher notes. Employing narrative data analysis I constructed a case for each participant using the assignments as both chronological organization and categorical scaffolding for the arrangement and presentation of the data. I then compared the individual cases to identify similarities and differences within the whole. My analysis of research findings indicated the following: First, student teachers identified personal concerns related to affective awareness, vulnerability from uncertainty, desire for efficacy, and identity confusion during their student teaching experiences. Second, written forms of inquiry produced evidence of open-mindedness and responsibility amongst student teacher participants, while artistic forms of inquiry yielded evidence of wholeheartedness and self-knowledge amongst student teacher participants. Third, the data indicated that although benefits could be located in written inquiry, participants attached little value or meaning to this method; whereas, artistic inquiry was perceived as an especially impactful and meaningful method of inquiry by student teacher participants. Overall, the student teaching seminar served as a space where student teacher participants shared stories, described contexts, identified issues, navigated tensions, and exhibited personal and insightful developments that demonstrated reflective learning connected to self-understanding and personal growth. Implications for the research suggest that facilitators of such a course should have a concentrated awareness of the constraints of the seminar structure; approach problem exploring rather than problem solving techniques with teacher candidates; and that there is an acute need for supportive and safe spaces for student teachers to process their experiences through multiple methods. This study generated detailed insight into art student teachers' unequivocally unique, yet fundamentally shared journeys, in processing, negotiating, and ultimately understanding their practicum experiences. Keywords: student teacher, seminar, inquiry, reflection, artmaking, art education

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The nurturance of creative capacity and cultural awareness have been identified as important 21st century concerns, given the ways that globalisation has challenged cultural diversity. This thesis explores the share that the art classroom, as a formative place, has in supporting such concerns. It specifically examines artmaking strategies that visual arts teachers may use to help adolescent students to develop and negotiate their senses of self, place and community. Held within this goal is the assumption that both student and teacher perspectives are important to this endeavor. This thesis, accordingly, draws upon empirical work undertaken with lower secondary school level visual art students in Christchurch, New Zealand and teacher-trainees in Kingston, Jamaica to explore this potential in multi-dimensional ways. The research employs a qualitative, arts-based methodology, centred on the transformative capacity of ‘visual knowing’ to render this potential visible. A/r/tography as a particular strand of arts-based methodology, served to also implicate my artist-researcher-teacher roles in the study to facilitate both reflection and reflexivity and to capture the complexity and dynamics of the study. Multiple case studies provided the contexts to furnish these possibilities, and to theorize the intrinsic qualities of each case, as well as the complementary aspects of the inquiry in depth. The conceptual framework that underpins this study draws widely on scholarship relating to contemporary artmaking practices, visual culture, culturally responsive and place-conscious pedagogical practices. The research findings reveal that when the artmaking experience is framed around the personal and cultural experiences of the participants, both students and teachers participate in the enterprise meaningfully as co-constructors of knowledge. In this process, students develop the confidence to bring their unique feelings, experiences and understandings to the artmaking process, and develop a sense of ‘insideness’ that leads to strong senses of self, place and community. This also creates a space where the authentic interpretation of artmaking activities goes beyond the creation of borders around cultural differences, and instead generates multiple entry points for students to engage with information. The findings also indicate that while the nature of artmaking is improvisatory and emergent, structure is an integral element in the facilitation of habits toward perception and meaning making. Accordingly, emphases on structured, open-ended artmaking experiences, framed aesthetically, as well as exposure to both the products and processes of contemporary art serve this endeavor. Artmaking boundaries and enabling structures also help to supplement this process. Though this research is limited in scope (in terms of the community engagement), there exists evidence that collaboration with community resource persons enlarges students’ conceptions of artmaking. It presents the potential to address broad issues of local and global import, which also have relevance for the ways students understand their relationships with the world. For researchers outside of the school and community culture however, this process requires close working relations with school personnel to ensure its effectiveness and to facilitate those school-community bridges. The undertaking is also best realized when participants have their own senses of its value, and, as such, are more inclined to participate. A/r/tography, as an arts-based methodology presents much potential for examining the complexities of the artmaking experience. As a form of active inquiry it helps those who employ its features to be more attuned toward enquiry, their ways of being in the world, the ways the personal may be negotiated in a community of belonging, and the development of practices that address difference. This contributes to evolving and alternative research possibilities that value visual forms of ‘knowing’. Finally, this thesis addresses the paucity of research on visual arts education at the secondary level, especially in the Jamaican context. A significant feature of this research is the evidence of its effectiveness with both lower secondary school students and teachers across geographical contexts. It therefore presents the potential for similar studies to be undertaken internationally. Given that the results are site specific however, it is recommended that the adaptation of the framework of this study for future purposes also respond to the specific realities of those contexts.

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