This thesis is a narrative case study that examined the studio art practice of Lead Pencil Studio, a Seattle-based artist collaborative that explore our spatial relationships with architecture through site-specific installations. The case study specifically focused on the work of Daniel Mihalyo and Annie Han (Lead Pencil Studio) while they were at the Visual Arts Center in The University of Texas at Austin for a spring 2013 artist-in-residence program. The research focused specifically on the artists’ day-to-day process, examining the thoughts and actions that went into creating their work, Diffuse Reflection Lab, a two-story plywood structure that examined reflection’s effect on architecture through various vignettes. Through concentrated observations of the Lead Pencil Studio’s work and three semi-structured interviews, this thesis examined how traditional research practices are integrated into the studio art process. By examining the art/research relationship the author also situates this work in the field of practice-based research. While this work specifically focused on the research conducted by a pair of professional artists, it also extends to a broader argument about the role of research in art lessons. Since this thesis is based in art education, it connects the themes observed in the artists’ studio practice to interdisciplinary learning and arts integration. The author ultimately argues that Lead Pencil Studio’s art/research practice can be used in the classroom as an example of transdisciplinary learning and that it models a rigorous approach to creativity within other disciplines. / text

This thesis document presents a case study of a professional development playbuilding process at a public elementary school located in Austin, Texas. The study argues that playbuilding is a form of participatory action arts-based research particularly when positioned within the professional development setting. This qualitative study uses a narrative thematic analysis of the playbuilding process and workshop performance to examine how reflective and reflexive practice is situated within playbuilding as professional development. The document concludes with a discussion of the limitations and transformative potential of playbuilding and argues for the creation of critical pedagogical professional learning communities for teachers in school settings. / text

This study focuses on a girl-centered, anti-racist, feminist PAR program with Indigenous and racialized girls in Victoria, a smaller, predominantly white city in British Columbia, Canada. As a partnership among antidote: Multiracial and Indigenous Girls and Women’s Network, and an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers who are also members of antidote, this project defies typical insider-outsider dynamics. In this thesis, I intend to speak back to mainstream Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) literature, contesting the notion that this methodology provides an easy escape from the research engine and underlying colonial formations. Practices of YPAR are continuously (re)colonized, producing new forms of colonialism and imperialism. Our process can be described as an ongoing rhythm of disruptions and recolonizations that are not simple opposites, but are mutually reliant and constitutive within neocolonial formations. In other words, our practice involved creatively disrupting new forms of colonialism and imperialism as they emerged, while recognizing that our responses were not outside of these formations. I seek to make our roles as researchers visible, rather than hidden by hegemonic equalizing claims of PAR, and will explore some of the ways that white noise infiltrated our ongoing efforts of decolonizing YPAR practices. / Graduate

The aim of this thesis is to explore the entanglement of various power axes with the body through 'body mapping' and to look into how the implementation of the method enriches research processes. 'Body mapping' is an arts-based method which places the body in the center of social inquiry. This allows the body to be explored as a central site where social identity is negotiated, while being engaged in this exploration. This orientation might allow insights into how embodied power relations affect people’s lives and how 'body mapping' can contribute to this exploration through raising consciousness and bringing forward personal embodied knowledges. 'Body mapping' will thus ideally allow participants to see themselves through a different angle and thereby engage with questions of how normative ideas in relation to identity are shaping their experiences and feelings of non/belonging in Swedish society. This might initiate newly informed understandings in participants’ lives regarding critical consciousness on their positionality and foster participants’ connection to their bodies as sources of knowledge.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s first call to action is to reduce the number of Indigenous children and youth in care, including keeping young people in culturally appropriate environments. While we work towards this goal, culturally appropriate resources are needed to support children and youth as evidence shows that when Indigenous youth have access to cultural teachings, they have improved physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health outcomes. Our project focused on the protective qualities of Indigenous coming of age teachings. Together with our community partner Surrounded by Cedar Child and Family Services, we worked to develop resources that inform and advocate for a culturally-centered coming of age for urban Indigenous youth living in foster care in Victoria, British Columbia on Lekwungen Territory. This dissertation begins with a literature review to provide the social and historical context surrounding urban Indigenous youth-in-care’s access to coming of age teachings. This is followed by a description of the Indigenous research paradigm that guided our work, what it meant for us to do this project in a good way, and the methods that we used to develop three visual storytelling knowledge sharing tools. Three manuscripts are presented, two published and one submitted, that reflect a strength-based vision of coming of age shared by knowledge holders who participated in our community events. The first manuscript retells the events of the knowledge holder’s dinner, where community members shared their perspectives on four questions related to community engagement and youth support. An analysis of the event’s transcripts revealed key themes including the responsibility of creating safe-spaces for youth, that coming of age is a community effort, and the importance of youth self-determining their journey. A graphic recording and short story are used to illustrate and narrate the relationship between key themes and related signifiers. This manuscript highlights the willingness of the community to collectively support youth in their journeys to adulthood. The second manuscript focuses on our two youth workshops that had the objective of understanding what rites of passage youth in SCCFS’s care engage with and how they learn what cultural teachings were most important to them. The findings suggest that when youth experience environments of belonging, and know they are ‘part of something bigger’, qualities like self-determination, self-awareness, and empowerment are strengthened. The third manuscript focuses on how we translated our project findings into different storytelling modalities using an Indigenist arts-based methodological approach. The project findings provided the inspiration and content for a fictional story called Becoming Wolf, which was adapted into a graphic novel, and a watercolour infographic. These knowledge sharing media present our project findings in accessible and meaningful ways that maintain the context and essences of our learnings. This research illustrates how Indigenous coming of age is an experience of interdependent teachings, events, and milestones, that contribute to the wellness of the body, mind, heart, and spirit of youth and the Indigenous community more broadly. Through our efforts, we hope to create a shared awareness about the cultural supports available to urban Indigenous youth that can contribute to lifelong wellness. / Graduate

My inquiry, centered on the applied practice of teaching, confronts the detachment that often disassociates the intellectual study of music theory from the physical experience of music. This pedagogical detachment, perceived as a split between opposing views of knowledge, privileges positivist science over interpretive art (Aróstegui, 2003), producing written competencies that have little or no musical meaning (Rogers, 2004). Endeavouring to re-attach music theory and the music it was initially intended to explain (Dirié, 2014), I constructed four Listening Guides to align with the intermediate-level theory curriculum of the Royal Conservatory of Music. Their construction incorporates elements of design research along with an underlying framework derived from the Kodály Method’s four-step instructional process. Given my multi-faceted personal/professional interactions with music theory, my research project is presented in the form of a quest narrative that weaves together my story and the stories of participant teachers who established the Listening Guides’ potential usefulness through reviewing and implementing interactions. This narrative, as a creative representation of arts-based research practices (Leavy, 2015), is derived from the blurring of specific cognitive findings and less definable aesthetic knowings (Greenwood, 2012). My data, both the prototypical data I designed and the empirical data I collected from focus group discussions with my participants, are filtered through an a/r/tographic lens that acknowledges the coexistence of my artist/researcher/teacher identities. The analysis of our aggregate narrative, as an exploration of music theory pedagogy with, about, in, and through music, relies on the evaluative tools of educational criticism (Eisner, 1991). Unfolding in a mostly linear climb, my quest for a fully integrated music/theory (art/science) pedagogy reaches its apex in the understanding that a music-logic organization confounds the subject-logic of traditional teaching approaches. Thus, my inquiry challenges the customary practices of scientific knowledge-building with a model for artistic “ways-of-knowing” in music theory pedagogy.

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